This page allows you to search a particular semester's course offerings in History and filter them by Major/Minor requirement. We also invite you to explore Penn History courses on the Pathways App. This fun, game-like platform allows you to see connections between History courses, so that you can better sequence them. It also encourages you to ask “how can History help us answer big questions?” Give it a try!
| Title | Instructors | Location | Time | Description | Cross listings | Fulfills | Registration notes | Major Concentrations | Major/Minor Requirements Fulfilled | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIST 0061-401 | Of Horses, Bows, and Fermented Milk: The Silk Road in 10 Objects | Oscar Aguirre Mandujano | DRLB 3W2 | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | The empires of the Turkic and Turkish peoples have stretched across much of Eurasia since before the Common Era until the twentieth century. We first hear of them in Chinese chroniclers’ tales of a powerful people in the wilderness. Greek historians, Byzantine writers, and Arab polymaths write about the empires of the steppes. Centuries later, the heirs of the heroes of these empires move south and west, establishing empires and tribal confederations beyond the steppe, in Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Middle East. The Turkic empires seem to appear in the periphery of many civilizations, challenging, and, one could say, enriching their borders. But looking at a map, is really more than a half of Eurasia a periphery? If we flip the map, could we say these historians were writing from the margins of the Turkish empires? This course introduces the student to the history of empire by following the various histories of Turkic and Turkish people through 15 objects. It discusses the questions of periphery, borders, and the divide between agrarian, pastoral, and nomadic societies. The student will learn to derive historical questions and hypothesis through the intensive study of material culture, literature, and historical writing tracing the long and diverse history of the bow, the saddle, dumplings, and fermented milk (among others) across Eurasia. | MELC0460401 | Cross Cultural Analysis History & Tradition Sector |
World | Africa/Middle East, East/South Asia, pre-1800 | ||||
| HIST 0100-001 | Deciphering America | Kathleen M Brown Jacob Auden Davis Amy C Offner |
COHN 402 | MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | This course examines American history from the first contacts of the indigenous peoples of North America with European settlers to our own times by focusing on several telling moments in this history. The course treats thirteen of these moments and each unit begins with a specific primary document, historical figure, image, or cultural artifact to commence the delving into the American past. Some of these icons are familiar, but the ensuing deciphering will render them as more complicated; some are unfamiliar, but they will emerge as absolutely telling. The course meets for two in-person lectures each week and a required recitation. Course requirements include: student’s choice of ten “before” journal entries (1-2 sentences) and ten end of the week “after” journal entries (300-word maximum per entry); a take home mid-term exam; a part take home and part in-class final exam; and recitation attendance and participation. | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0100001 | American, Political | pre-1800, US | ||||
| HIST 0120-301 | Abolitionists, Suffragists, and Senators: The Speakers and Speeches that Shaped 19th Century America | Anders T Bright | WILL 28 | M 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Rightly or wrongly, historians identify early nineteenth-century America as the ‘Golden Age’ of American oratory. Well-known figures like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster rose to power upon the back of their spoken words, and captivated national audiences with their literary utterances and rhetorical flourishes. Abolitionists, suffragists, and other social reformers of the period similarly relied on the spoken word to convince audiences of their moral stances. In this class— a seminar offered in collaboration with Penn's Communication Within the Curriculum program— students will accomplish two goals: first, learn about the political history of the nineteenth-century United States through studying the speeches of the century’s speech-makers; and, second, learn about the art of public-speaking through analyzing the methods and rhetorical tools employed by these historical figures. | American | US | ||||||
| HIST 0205-601 | Europe: From Fall of Rome to Age of Exploration | Eleanor Webb | WILL 201 | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This course offers a broad introduction to the history of Europe from around the fourth to sixteenth century CE. We begin with Roman civilization facing a series of crises that led to its eventual fall in the West and the great migrations that resulted in ‘barbarian’ kingdoms. We then explore European history as it developed afterwards through key questions that capture its essence: what was ‘barbarian’ about these kingdoms and what exactly were the ‘dark ages’? How did political power transform throughout the period to produce nascent nation states in the end? What did it mean to be a medieval knight? In what ways were women powerless or powerful? What was city life like as these began to be rebuilt? What roles did faith and knowledge play in this world? What were the first universities like? How did European culture in this period handle difference, and how is this similar or different to modern approaches? How do we even know this history from centuries to over a millennium ago? Students will discover a Europe that is fascinating in its contradictions: both dark and bright, both closed and open, both strikingly different and yet often surprisingly familiar. | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
European, Political | Europe, pre-1800 | |||||
| HIST 0350-401 | Africa Since 1800 | Lee V Cassanelli Mehmet Emir Turgutalp |
COHN 402 | TR 9:00 AM-9:59 AM | Survey of major themes, events, and personalities in African history from the early nineteenth century through the 1960s. Topics include abolition of the slave trade, European imperialism, impact of colonial rule, African resistance, religious and cultural movements, rise of naturalism and pan-Africanism, issues of ethnicity and "tribalism" in modern Africa. | AFRC0350401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0350401 | World | Africa/Middle East | |||
| HIST 0450-401 | Modern Latin America 1808-Present | Javier R. Ardila Joaquin Ladeuix Melissa Teixeira |
MOOR 216 | TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course examines central themes of Latin American history, from independence to the present. It engages a hemispheric and global approach to understand the economic and social transformations of the region. We will explore the anti-imperial struggles, revolutions, social movements, and global economic crises that have given rise to new national projects for development, or have frustrated the realization of such goals. Taking a historical perspective, we will ask: What triggers imperial breakdown? How did slaves navigate the boundary between freedom and bondage? Was the Mexican Revolution revolutionary? How did the Great Depression lead to the rise of state-led development? In what ways have citizens mobilized for equality, a decent standard of living, and cultural inclusion? And what future paths will the region take given uneasy export markets and current political uncertainty? | LALS0450401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0450401 | Political, World | Latin America/Caribbean | |||
| HIST 0560-401 | Modern Japanese History | Frederick R. Dickinson Suyoung Kim |
MCNB 150 | MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | This course will survey the major political, economic, social and intellectual trends in the making of modern Japan. Special emphasis will be given to the turbulent relationship between state and society from 1800 to the present. | EALC0750401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0560401 | Political, World | East/South Asia | |||
| HIST 0610-001 | How We and Others Think: A Global Approach to Intellectual History | Oscar Aguirre Mandujano | DRLB 3W2 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Just over a century ago, a woman raised her eyebrows in disgust and disbelief when she learned her neighbors were sleeping with their pet cat in the same room. She even took her neighbors to court for immoral behavior. A couple of centuries before that, most people were unsure whether coffee was a pernicious substance and therefore debated the merits of coffee. People have not always thought the way we do. For every idea that seems natural today, many hours of discussion, both oral and written, were spent in universities, academies, civil associations, taverns, public houses, and coffeehouses. This class explores how others used to think about things we now consider natural. Becoming natural, however, necessitated debate, discussion, and compromise. The class focuses on examples from around the world, including Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts to consider how we can study ideas from the past. The course will also explore the different methods, archives, and sources used by intellectual historians to explore two core questions. First, how can we understand our and others’ intellectual traditions from the vantage of shared assumptions and practices originating in the present? Second, how were ideas in the past interconnected through exchange, travel, or parallels? By the end of the course, students will be able to identify significant currents of change in intellectual history written in local and global contexts. |
Intellectual, World | Global Issues, pre-1800 | ||||||
| HIST 0710-401 | African American Life and Culture in Slavery | Heather A Williams | WLNT 330A | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course will examine the lives of enslaved African Americans in the United States, both in the North and the South. We will engage historiographical debates, and tackle questions that have long concerned historians. For example, if slaves were wrenched from families and traded, could they sustain family relationships? If slaves worked from sun-up until sun-down, how could they create music? We will engage with primary and secondary sources to expand our understandings of values, cultural practices, and daily life among enslaved people. Topics will include: literacy, family, labor, food, music and dance, hair and clothing, religion, material culture, resistance, and memories of slavery. Several disciplines including History, Archaeology, Literature, and Music, will help us in our explorations. Written, oral, and artistic texts for the course will provide us with rich sources for exploring the nuances of slave life, and students will have opportunities to delve deeply into topics that are of particular interest to them. | AFRC2760401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | American | US | ||||
| HIST 0721-401 | Ancient Rome | Grant Gerald Bruner Campbell A. Grey Louis James Polcin Daniel Qin Phoebe Jane Thompson |
ARCH 208 | MW 12:00 PM-12:59 PM | At its furthest extent during the second century CE, the Roman Empire was truly a "world empire", stretching from northern Britain to North Africa and Egypt, encompassing the whole of Asia Minor, and bordering the Danube in its route from the Black Forest region of Germany to the Black Sea. But in its earliest history it comprised a few small hamlets on a collection of hills adjacent to the Tiber river in central Italy. Over a period of nearly 1500 years, the Roman state transformed from a mythical Kingdom to a Republic dominated by a heterogeneous, competitive aristocracy to an Empire ruled, at least notionally, by one man. It developed complex legal and administrative structures, supported a sophisticated and highly successful military machine, and sustained elaborate systems of economic production and exchange. It was, above all, a society characterized both by a willingness to include newly conquered peoples in the project of empire, and by fundamental, deep-seated practices of social exclusion and domination. This course focuses in particular upon the history of the Roman state between the fifth century BCE and the third century CE, exploring its religious and cultural practices, political, social and economic structures. It also scrutinizes the fundamental tensions and enduring conflicts that characterized this society throughout this 800-year period. | ANCH0102401, CLST0102401 | Cross Cultural Analysis History & Tradition Sector |
European | Europe | ||||
| HIST 0725-401 | National Antiquities: Genealogies, Hagiographies, Holy Objects | Julia Verkholantsev | WILL 320 | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Human societies have always wanted to know about their origins, the reasons for their customs, the foundations of their social institutions and religious beliefs, and the justification of their power structures. They have conceived of creation myths and of origins stories for their communities in order to position themselves within the past and present of the natural and human worlds. The newly Christianized kingdoms of Medieval Europe faced the challenge of securing a place in the new vision of universal Providential history, and they inscribed their own histories into the narratives they knew from the authoritative sources of the time - biblical genealogies and heroic stories inherited from the poets of classical antiquity. The deeds and virtues of saintly kings and church hierarchs provided a continuity of historical narrative on the sacred map of time and space. In the 19th century, while interest in medieval antiquity as a source of inspiration for political and cultural renewal brought about a critical study of evidence, it also effected reinterpretation and repurposing of this evidence vis-a-vis a new political concept - that of a nation. This seminar will focus on central, eastern and southeast European nations and explore three categories of "national antiquities" that have been prominent in the workings of their modern nationalisms: (1) stories of ethnogenesis (so-called, origo gentis) that narrate and explain the beginnings and genealogy of peoples and states, as they are recorded in medieval and early modern chronicles, (2) narratives about holy people, who are seen as national patron-saints, and (3) material objects of sacred significance (manuscripts, religious ceremony objects, crowns, icons) that act as symbols of political, cultural and national identities. Our approach will be two-fold: On the one hand, we will read medieval sources and ask the question of what they tell us about the mindset of the authors and societies that created them. We will think about how the knowledge of the past helped medieval societies legitimize the present and provide a model for the future. On the other hand, we will observe how medieval narratives and artifacts have been interpreted in modern times and how they became repurposed - first, during the "Romantic" stage of national awakening, then in the post-imperial era of independent nation-states, and, finally, in the post-Soviet context of reimagined Europe. We will observe how the study of nationalistic mentality enhances our understanding of how the past is represented and repurposed in scholarship and politics. | REES1174401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0725401 | European | Europe | ||||
| HIST 0751-401 | Japan: The Age of the Samurai | David Spafford | COLL 319 | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Who (or what) where the samurai? What does it mean to say that Japan had an "Age of the Samurai"? In popular imagination, pre-modern Japan has long been associated with its hereditary warrior class. Countless movies have explored the character and martial prowess of these men. Yet warriors constituted but a tiny portion of the societies they inhabited and ruled, and historians researching medieval Japan have turned their attentions to a great range of subjects and to other classes (elite and commoner alike). This class is designed to acquaint students with the complex and diverse centuries that have been called the "Age of the Samurai"-roughly, the years between ca. 1110 and 1850. In the course of the semester, we will explore the central themes in the historiography of warrior society, while introducing some of the defining texts that have shaped our imagination of this age (from laws to epic poems, from codes of conduct to autobiographies). | EALC1746401, EALC5746401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | World | East/South Asia | ||||
| HIST 0755-401 | History, Culture, and Religion in Early India | Daud Ali Neha Tiwari |
ANNS 111 | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course surveys the culture, religion and history of India from 2500 BCE to 1200 CE. The course examines the major cultural, religious and social factors that shaped the course of early Indian history. The following themes will be covered: the rise and fall of Harappan civilization, the "Aryan Invasion" and Vedic India, the rise of cities, states and the religions of Buddhism and Jainism, the historical context of the growth of classical Hinduism, including the Mahabharata, Ramayana and the development of the theistic temple cults of Saivism and Vaisnavism, processes of medieval agrarian expansion and cultic incorporation as well as the spread of early Indian cultural ideas in Southeast Asia. In addition to assigned secondary readings students will read select primary sources on the history of religion and culture of early India, including Vedic and Buddhist texts, Puranas and medieval temple inscriptions. Major objectives of the course will be to draw attention to India's early cultural and religious past and to assess contemporary concerns and ideologies in influencing our understanding and representation of that past. | RELS0003401, SAST0003401 | Cross Cultural Analysis History & Tradition Sector |
World | East/South Asia | ||||
| HIST 0757-401 | Mongolian Civilization: Nomadic and Sedentary | Christopher Pratt Atwood | WILL 205 | MWF 3:30 PM-4:29 PM | This course will explore how two intertwined ways of life - pastoral nomadism and settling down for religious, educational, and economic reasons - have shaped the cultural, artistic, and intellectual traditions of Mongolia. In this course students will learn about Mongolian pastoral nomadism, and how the Mongolian economy, literature, and steppe empires were built on grass and livestock. We will also explore how Mongolians have also just as consistently used the foundations of empire to build sedentary monuments and buildings, whether funerary complexes, Buddhist monasteries, socialist boarding schools, and modern capitals. Over time, these cities have changed shape, location, and ideology, all the while remaining linked to the mobile pastoralists in the countryside. We will also explore how these traditions of mobile pastoralism and urbanism were transformed in the 20th century, by urbanization, communist ideology, and the new reality of free-market democracy, ideological pluralism, and a new mining dependent economy. We will meet modern painters and musicians who interweave Mongolian nomadic traditions with contemporary world trends, and consider the future of rural traditions in a modern world. | EALC0080401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | World | East/South Asia | ||||
| HIST 0810-402 | The City | Nina A Johnson Michael P Nairn |
PCPE 203 | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Course will focus on Baltimore using The Wire and its sequel, We Own This City, as core texts. Following the trajectory of The Wire, the course will explore the history and development of the city and its institutions with a thematic focus on the impacts of the War on Drugs and policing on Baltimore’s African American community, urban revitalization, violence and community trauma, and the role of the carceral state in American cities. | URBS0210401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0810402 | |||||
| HIST 0811-401 | Faculty-Student Collaborative Action Seminar in Urban University-Community Rltn | Ira Harkavy Theresa E Simmonds |
NRN 00 | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This seminar helps students develop their capacity to solve strategic, real-world problems by working collaboratively in the classroom, on campus, and in the West Philadelphia community. Students develop proposals that demonstrate how a Penn undergraduate education might better empower students to produce, not simply "consume," societally-useful knowledge, as well as to function as caring, contributing citizens of a democratic society. Their proposals help contribute to the improvement of education on campus and in the community, as well as to the improvement of university-community relations. Additionally, students provide college access support at Paul Robeson High School for one hour each week. | AFRC1780401, URBS1780401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0811401 | American | US | |||
| HIST 0819-401 | Queer Life in U.S. History | Beans Velocci | BENN 222 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Queerness has held a variety of meanings and queer life has looked different over the past several centuries of United States history, but it certainly isn’t new. This course traces queer existence—in terms of both gender and sexuality—from the seventeenth century through the present, and foregrounds lived experience, identity formation, community development, and political consciousness. We will attend closely to how race, class, immigration status, and ability shape and are shaped by queer life, and engage with current topics of concern in the field of queer history, like the rural/urban divide, capitalism and neoliberalism, and queer memory. | GSWS2320401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | American, Gender | US | ||||
| HIST 0823-401 | Portraits of Russian Society: Art, Fiction, Drama | Siarhei Biareishyk | WILL 216 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course covers 19C Russian cultural and social history. Each week-long unit is organized around a single medium-length text (novella, play, memoir) which opens up a single scene of social history birth, death, duel, courtship, tsar, and so on. Each of these main texts is accompanied by a set of supplementary materials paintings, historical readings, cultural-analytical readings, excerpts from other literary works, etc. The object of the course is to understand the social codes and rituals that informed nineteenth-century Russian life, and to apply this knowledge in interpreting literary texts, other cultural objects, and even historical and social documents (letters, memoranda, etc.). We will attempt to understand social history and literary interpretation as separate disciplines yet also as disciplines that can inform one another. In short: we will read the social history through the text, and read the text against the social history. | REES0110401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | European, Intellectual | Europe | ||||
| HIST 0830-401 | The Making of the Middle East | Paul M. Cobb | COLL 319 | TR 8:30 AM-9:59 AM | This is the second half of MELC's Middle East sequence, but past enrollment in MELC 0001 is not required to take this course. This course surveys Islamic civilization from circa 600 (the rise of Islam) to the start of the modern era and concentrates on political, social, and cultural trends. Although the emphasis will be on Middle Eastern societies, we will occasionally consider developments in other parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and Spain, where Islamic civilization was or has been influential. Our goal is to understand the shared features that have distinguished Islamic civilization as well as the varieties of experience that have endowed it with so much diversity. | MELC0002401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
World | Africa/Middle East | ||||
| HIST 0837-401 | Religion and Society in Africa | David K. Amponsah Senit Negassi Kidane |
COHN 392 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | In recent decades, many African countries have perennially ranked very high among the most religious. This course serves as an introduction to major forms of religiosity in sub-Saharan Africa. Emphasis will be devoted to the indigenous religious traditions, Christianity and Islam, as they are practiced on the continent. We will examine how these religious traditions intersect with various aspects of life on the continent. The aim of this class is to help students to better understand various aspects of African cultures by dismantling stereotypes and assumptions that have long characterized the study of religions in Africa. The readings and lectures are will be drawn from historical and a few anthropological, and literary sources. | AFRC2870401, RELS2870401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector |
World | Africa/Middle East | ||||
| HIST 0850-401 | Introduction to Modern India | Daud Ali Shrinidhi Narasimhan |
ANNS 111 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This introductory course will provide an outline of major events and themes in Indian history, from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the re-emergence of India as a global player in the 21st century. The course will discuss the following themes: society and economy in Mughal India; global trade between India and the West in the 17th century; the rise of the English East India Company's control over Indian subcontinent in the 18th century; its emergence and transformation of India into a colonial economy; social and religious reform movements in the 19th century; the emergence of elite and popular anti-colonial nationalisms; independence and the partition of the subcontinent; the emergence of the world's largest democracy; the making of an Indian middle class; and the nuclearization of South Asia. | SAST0001401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
World | East/South Asia | ||||
| HIST 0860-401 | Introduction to East Asia: Korea | So-Rim Lee | MOOR 216 | MW 1:45 PM-2:44 PM | What is Korean civilization—is it a singular notion, or are there many that became what we know as South and North Korea today? How have Koreans interpreted and represented their own cultures, traditions, and history through the years? This introductory course offers a broad chronological survey of Korean history, arts, and culture from its early days to the present moment. Our readings will include a selection of literature—from foundation myths, poetry, to modern fiction—as well as royal edicts and political manifestoes and op-eds. Alongside the readings, we will also engage with multimedia resources including various artwork, film, and music. Through these cultural texts, we will explore the political, economic, and social order of different historical eras and identify major currents and events on the Korean peninsula such as shifting political climates, class struggles, gender dynamics, and complex relations with its East Asian neighbors and the West. We will also be treated to guest lectures from the interdisciplinary Korean studies scholars affiliated with the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at Penn. By the end of the semester, students will become familiar with the many continuities and breaks that constitute Korean culture from ancient to modern times and gain good insight into where it might be headed in the future. No prior knowledge of Korea or the Korean language is required. | EALC0060401 | History & Tradition Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
World | East/South Asia | ||||
| HIST 0871-401 | The Material Past in a Digital World | Jason Herrmann | MUSE 190 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | The material remains of the human past -objects and spaces- provide tangible evidence of past people's lives. Today's information technologies improve our ability to document, study, and present these materials. But what does it mean to deal with material evidence in a virtual context? In this class, students will learn basic digital methods for studying the past while working with objects, including those in the collections of the Penn Museum. This class will teach relational database design and 3D object modeling. As we learn about acquiring and managing data, we will gain valuable experience in the evaluation and use of digital tools. The digital humanities are a platform both for learning the basic digital literacy students need to succeed in today's world and for discussing the human consequences of these new technologies and data. We will discuss information technology's impact on the study and presentation of the past, including topics such as public participation in archaeological projects, educational technologies in museum galleries, and the issues raised by digitizing and disseminating historic texts and objects. Finally, we will touch on technology's role in the preservation of the past in today's turbulent world. No prior technical experience is required, but we hope students will share an enthusiasm for the past. | ANTH1303401, ARTH0127401, CLST1303401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | ||||||
| HIST 0873-401 | Existence in Black | David K. Amponsah | MUSE 329 | R 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Racial, colonial, and other political formations have encumbered Black existence since at least the fifteenth-century. Black experiences of and reflections on these matters have been the subject of existential writings and artistic expressions ranging from the blues to reggae, fiction and non-fiction. Reading some of these texts alongside canonical texts in European existential philosophy, this class will examine how issues of freedom self, alienation, finitude, absurdity, race, and gender shape and are shaped by the global Black experience. Since Black aliveness is literally critical to Black existential philosophy, we shall also engage questions of Black flourishing amidst the potential for pessimism and nihilism. | AFRC4406401, AFRC5060401, PHIL4515401, PHIL6515401 | Intellectual | ||||||
| HIST 0876-401 | Medicine in History | Rana Asali Hogarth | FAGN 118 | TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course surveys the history of medical knowledge and practice from antiquity to the present. No prior background in the history of science or medicine is required. The course has two principal goals: (1)to give students a practical introduction to the fundamental questions and methods of the history of medicine, and (2)to foster a nuanced, critical understanding of medicine's complex role in contemporary society. The couse takes a broadly chronological approach, blending the perspectives of the patient,the physician,and society as a whole--recognizing that medicine has always aspired to "treat" healthy people as well as the sick and infirm. Rather than history "from the top down"or "from the bottom up,"this course sets its sights on history from the inside out. This means, first, that medical knowledge and practice is understood through the personal experiences of patients and caregivers. It also means that lectures and discussions will take the long-discredited knowledge and treatments of the past seriously,on their own terms, rather than judging them by todays's standards. Required readings consist largely of primary sources, from elite medical texts to patient diaries. Short research assignments will encourge students to adopt the perspectives of a range of actors in various historical eras. | HSOC0400401, STSC0400401 | History & Tradition Sector | World | Global Issues | ||||
| HIST 0877-401 | Modern Biology and Social Implications | John Ceccatti | COHN 337 | TR 7:00 PM-8:29 PM | This course covers the history of biology in the 19th and 20th centuries, giving equal consideration to three dominant themes: evolutionary biology, classical genetics, and molecular biology. The course is intended for students with some background in the history of science as well as in biology, although no specific knowledge of either subject in required. We will have three main goals: first, to delineate the content of the leading biological theories and experimental practices of the past two centuries; second, to situate these theories and practices in their historical context, noting the complex interplay between them and the dominant social, political, and economic trends; and, third, to critically evaluate various methodological approaches to the history of science. | STSC1151401 | Natural Sciences & Mathematics Sector | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST0877401 | Intellectual | ||||
| HIST 1110-001 | Hamilton's America: US History 1776-1804 | Julia Marie Bouwkamp Sarah L. H. Gronningsater Christen Hammock Jones Carson M Turner |
DRLB A8 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | In this course, students will learn about the political, constitutional, and social history of the United States from 1776 (the year the colonies declared their independence from Great Britain) to 1800 (the year Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in a heated partisan election for the presidency). Alexander Hamilton, an influential American statesman during this time, will be our guide to the many events and transformations that occurred during these years. The course is not, however, a biographical course about Hamilton. Topics covered include: the politics of independence, the Revolutionary War, the development of state and national republics, the creation of the U.S. Constitution, the role of ordinary people in the politics of the time period, the problem of slavery in the new nation, Native American power and loss, diplomatic affairs, and the rise of partisan politics. | American, Political | pre-1800, US | ||||||
| HIST 1120-401 | Yellow Peril, Red Scare: Cold War Asia in America | Mark Tseng-Putterman | MCNB 395 | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course explores how the Cold War in Asia has shaped dominant ideas about race, militarism, and citizenship, with particular consequences for both Asians and Asian Americans. As decolonization movements in Asia confronted a growing US empire, Cold War paranoia became linked to longstanding tropes of Asian invasion—merging the so-called “Yellow Peril” and “Red Scare” in the American imagination. Taking a cultural history approach, students will draw on both archival sources and popular media to examine the Cold War emergence of lingering tropes such as the communist spy, the war bride, the peasant insurgent, and the model minority. Topics covered include the Korean and Vietnam Wars, McCarthyism, the Third World movement, Asian/American military service, Cold War refugee policy, anti-imperialist activism, and the legacy of Cold War geopolitics in Asia today. | ASAM2110401 | American | US | |||||
| HIST 1125-001 | Native American History | Peter Jakob Olsen Harbich | EDUC 202 | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course will introduce the history of North America’s Indigenous nations from the continent’s first peopling through the close of the twentieth century. We will analyze the basic sequence and consequence of events such as: pre-Columbian migrations; the development of settled North American societies; the establishment and spread of European colonies; the contestation of and alliance with imperial projects by Indigenous nations; the emergence of Indian racial and cultural identity; the formation of the United States, the process of “Indian Removal”; the creation of reservations; the growth of assimilative programs through residential schooling; and the rise of modern tribal bureaucracy. Particular attention will be paid to the various strategies employed by Indigenous nations across time to establish and uphold government-to-government relationships with Western powers. Throughout, we will assess the history of Native America as flowing through its own channels—ones now intertwined with, but discrete from, those of the United States. | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST1125001 | American, Political | pre-1800, US | ||||
| HIST 1155-401 | Introduction to Asian American History | Eiichiro Azuma Julian Noah Tash |
MCNB 150 | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course will provide an introduction to the history of Asian Pacific Americans, focusing on the wide diversity of migrant experiences, as well as the continuing legacies of Orientalism on American-born APA's. Issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality will also be examined. | ASAM0102401 | History & Tradition Sector Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. |
American | US | ||||
| HIST 1165-401 | History of American Education | Paula Helene Rogers Jonathan L Zimmerman |
EDUC 120 | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course will examine the growth and development of American schools, from the birth of the republic into the present. By 1850, the United States sent a greater fraction of its children to school than any other nation on earth. Why? What did young people learn there? And, most of all, how did these institutions both reflect and shape our evolving conceptions of "America" itself? In an irreducibly diverse society, the answers were never simple. Americans have always defined their nation in a myriad of contrasting and often contradictory ways. So they have also clashed vehemently over their schools, which remain our central public vehicle for deliberating and disseminating the values that we wish to transmit to our young. Our course will pay close attention to these education-related debates, especially in the realms of race, class, and religion. When immigrants came here from other shores, would they have to relinquish their old cultures and languages? When African-Americans won their freedom from bondage, what status would they assume? And as different religious denominations fanned out across the country, how would they balance the uncompromising demands of faith with the pluralistic imperatives of democracy? All of these questions came into relief at school, where the answers changed dramatically over time. Early American teachers blithely assumed that newcomers would abandon their old-world habits and tongues; today, "multicultural education" seeks to preserve or even to celebrate these distinctive patterns. Post-emancipation white philanthropists designed vocational curricula for freed African-Americans, imagining blacks as loyal serfs; but blacks themselves demanded a more academic education, which would set them on the road to equality. Protestants and Catholics both used the public schools to teach their faith systems until the early 1960s, when the courts barred them from doing so; but religious controversies continue to hound the schools, especially on matters like evolution and sex education. How should our public schools address such dilemmas? How can the schools provide a "common" educaiton, as Horace Mann called it, melding us into an integrated whole while still respecting our inevitable differences? | EDUC5453401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST1165401 | American | US | |||
| HIST 1166-401 | A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered | Hardeep Dhillon | COLL 319 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Many Americans widely accept the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants despite the fact that immigration and border control has been a central feature of this nation’s past. This course explores the United States’ development of immigration and border enforcement during the twentieth century through an intersectional lens. It roots the structures of modern immigration and border enforcement in Native dispossession and histories of slavery, and interrogates how Asian, Black, and Latinx immigration has shaped and expanded immigration controls on, within, and beyond US territorial borders. In addition to historicizing the rise and expansion of major institutions of immigration control such as the US Border Patrol and Bureau of Naturalization, we explore how immigration controls were enforced on the ground and impacted the lives of everyday people. | AFRC1166401, ASAM1166401, LALS1166401 | American | US | |||||
| HIST 1169-401 | History of American Law Since 1877 | Jeanine Alvarez Justin J Mcculloch Lolo Salsbury Serrano Karen Tani |
ARCH 208 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course introduces students to major themes in U.S. legal history from 1877 to the present. Topics include (but are not limited to) citizenship and immigration, federalism, public regulation of economic activity, lawyers and the legal profession, criminalization, social welfare provision, and rights-claiming. Prominent through-lines include the relationship between law and politics; the struggles of marginalized groups for recognition and inclusion; and shifting, competing understandings of liberty, equality, and justice. Judicial decisions figure prominently in this course, but so, too, do other sources of law, including statutes, administrative decisions, and provisions of the U.S. Constitution. Students will leave this course with a better grasp of how the U.S. legal system operates and how it has channeled power, resources, and opportunity over time. | AFRC1169401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | American, Intellectual, Political | US | ||||
| HIST 1171-401 | The American South 1865-Present | Anna Kathleen Apostolidis Morefield William Sturkey |
DRLB A4 | TR 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | This course will trace the history of the American South from the end of the Civil War to the present. Charting its course out of the smoldering aftermath of the post-Civil War South, it will track a narrative of politics, economics, and culture across more than 150 years of life in the modern American South. The course will include deep examinations of race, gender, and culture, including a broad set of Southern stories and voices in an interdisciplinary journey across what is perhaps America’s most storied region. | AFRC1171401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector |
American | US | ||||
| HIST 1177-401 | African American History 1876 to Present | Vaughn A Booker Simone Marguerite Gulliver Olivia Kerr |
COLL 219 | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | A study of the major events, issues, and personalities in Afro-American history from Reconstruction to the present. The course will also examine the different slave experiences and the methods of black resistance and rebellion in the various slave systems. | AFRC1177401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector |
American | US | ||||
| HIST 1260-401 | Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the Age of Napoleon | Peter I. Holquist Filipp Kruchenov |
FAGN 114 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | In this course we will read what many consider to be the greatest book in world literature. This work, Tolstoy's War and Peace, is devoted to one of the most momentous periods in world history, the Napoleonic Era (1789-1815). We will study both the book and the era of the Napoleonic Wars: the military campaigns of Napoleon and his opponents, the grand strategies of the age, political intrigues and diplomatic betrayals, the ideologies and human dramas, the relationship between art and history. How does literature help us to understand this era? How does history help us to understand this great book? Because we will read War and Peace over the course of the entire semester, readings will be manageable and very enjoyable. | COML1262401, REES1380401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST1260401 | Diplomatic, European, Intellectual | Europe | |||
| HIST 1310-401 | Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade | Roquinaldo Ferreira | DRLB 3C6 | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course focuses on the history of selected African societies from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. The primary goal is to study the political, economic, social, and cultural history of a number of peoples who participated in the Atlantic slave trade or were touched by it during the era of their involvement. The course is designed to serve as an introduction to the history and culture of African peoples who entered the diaspora during the era of the slave trade. Its audience is students interested in the history of Africa, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic world, as well as those who want to learn about the history of the slave trade. Case studies will include the Yoruba, Akan, and Fon, as well as Senegambian and West-central African peoples. | AFRC1310401, LALS1310401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | World | Africa/Middle East, pre-1800 | ||||
| HIST 1361-401 | Sex Matters: Politics of Sex in the Modern Middle East | Secil Yilmaz | CANCELED | The course concentrates on the history of sexuality as it informed and shaped political and social change in the Middle East, and vice versa, in an engagement with global historical contexts. What does sexuality have to do with power, political rule, and mass movements in the modern Middle East? What can the study of sexuality and body politics teach us about colonialism and state formation over centuries of imperial rules and colonial regimes, as well as in the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism? What is the relationship between studying LGBTQIA+ movements alongside with feminism and the use of sex and sexuality as an analytical category? This course will investigate selected themes such as modernity, nationalism, and colonization and connect them to harem lives, politics of veiling/unveiling, reproductive rights, race, polygamy, masculinity, and early modern concepts of same-sex desire in connection with modern queer thought and activism to ask questions about the preconceived notions about "Middle Eastern sexualities." The course focuses on discussing on some of the many roles that sex and gender politics have played in social and political change in the Middle East, while thinking about gender, history, and society comparatively and transnationally. | GSWS1361401 | ||||||||
| HIST 1551-401 | History of US-China Relations | Amy E Gadsden | MCNB 285 | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | The list of issues shaping the US-China relationship is extensive. Trade and investment, the status and future of Taiwan, China’s expansion into the South China Sea and its relationships with East and Southeast Asian neighbors, the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s expanding influence in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, human rights, the status of Hong Kong, concerns about Xinjiang, technology transfer, intellectual property and cyberespionage, the status of people-to-people engagement in fields like education, health and cultural exchange and many others are all ongoing points of discussion between the two great powers. Understanding these issues in the present day requires exploring how these issues evolved over the decades and even centuries of engagement between the United States and China. Are there similarities between America’s Open-Door policy of the late 19th century and its position on trade with China today? What are the prospects for Taiwan policy given the complicated diplomatic history surrounding the recognition of the People’s Republic in the 1970s? When and why did human rights come to be a defining issue in the US-China relationship and how has it evolved over time? How have people-to-people exchanges been understood to undergird the relationship? How are 21st c. flashpoints, such as technology competition and cyberespionage, impacting the traditional list of tensions, such as Taiwan, maritime conflicts, and geopolitics in East Asia? What are the consistent through lines in America’s policies toward China and what has changed? This course will look at a series of issues that are at the center of the US-China relationship through an historical lens, providing students with insight into the forces that have shaped positions on both sides. Students will develop an understanding of key issues in the diplomatic relationship the United States and China today and their deep historical roots. No previous study of Chinese history is required for this course, but students will be expected to engage enthusiastically with the course material. |
EALC1734401 | American, Diplomatic, World | East/South Asia, US | |||||
| HIST 1702-401 | Introduction to Latin American and Latino Studies | Ann C. Farnsworth | WILL 216 | MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American and Latino Studies, this is a seminar oriented toward first and second year students. Readings will range widely, from scholarly work on the colonial world that followed from and pushed back against the "conquest"; to literary and artistic explorations of Latin American identities; to social scientists' explorations of how Latinos are changing the United States in the current generation. | LALS0720401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | American, World | Latin America/Caribbean, US | ||||
| HIST 1706-401 | Global Environmental History from the Paleolithic to the Present | Anne K Berg Marcy Norton |
COLL 219 | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course explores the changing relationships between human beings and the natural world from early history to the present. We will consider the various ways humans across the globe have interacted with and modified the natural world by using fire, domesticating plants and animals, extracting minerals and energy, designing petro-chemicals, splitting atoms and leaving behind wastes of all sorts. Together we consider the impacts, ranging from population expansion to species extinctions and climate change. We examine how human interactions with the natural world relate to broader cultural processes such as religion, colonialism and capitalism, and why it is important to understand the past, even the deep past, in order to rise to the challenges of the present. | ENVS1400401 | World | Global Issues, pre-1800 | |||||
| HIST 1731-401 | Financial Meltdown, Past and Present | Nicole M Adrian Nainika Dinesh Marc R Flandreau |
DRLB A2 | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Economic history is increasingly recognized as a crucial source of policy advice and is invoked with growing frequency in public debates. In particular, the subprime crisis in 2008 and after has generated a demand for "historical perspective" that would improve the understanding of the causes of financial turmoil and facilitate the prevention of comparable catastrophes. This course begins with a review of the principal features of the subprime crisis of 2008 and asks, so to speak, "how did we get there?" It answers by providing historical insights that shed light on crucial aspects of financial disasters. This is a history course, engaging with topics pertaining to economics, law and politics (national and international). Students with diverse backgrounds are expected to benefit from this course through acquiring a concrete knowledge of the historical evolution of fundamental institutions of financial capitalism. Ultimately, students enrolling in this course are expected to achieve proficiency in historically informed discussion of the mechanisms that were played out in the subprime crisis and beyond. | ECON0620401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector | Economic, European | Europe, Global Issues | ||||
| HIST 1735-401 | Cold War: Global History | Calvin Lin Benjamin Nathans De Vonte Armond Tinsley |
COHN 402 | MW 10:15 AM-11:14 AM | The Cold War was more than simply a military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union; it was the frame within which the entire world developed (for better or worse) for nearly five decades. This course will examine the cold War as a global phenomenon, covering not only the military and diplomatic history of the period, but also examining the social and cultural impact of the superpower confrontation. We will cover the origins of the conflict, the interplay between periods of tension and detente, the relative significance of disagreements within the opposing blocs, and the relationship between the "center" of the conflict in the North Atlantic/European area and the global "periphery". | REES1370401 | Humanties & Social Science Sector Cross Cultural Analysis |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST1735401 | Diplomatic, European, Political, World | Europe, Global Issues | |||
| HIST 1761-401 | Sex and Empire | Secil Yilmaz | MCNB 285 | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | This course explores the historical narratives surrounding modern empires and colonialism, with a specific focus on the role of sex and gender. Modern empires as complex political and social structures built upon and operated on the basis of difference—racial, religious, sexual. Colonial encounters not only produced unequal and uneven conditions for the colonized, but also in the construction of racialized and gendered structures in the formation of modern capitalism, market economies, political regimes, citizenship, everyday violence and so on. This course examines the historical literature on the intersections of power and historical experience in the framework of a variety of themes including modern family, marriage, slavery, property, labor, incarceration, sex trafficking, science of sex, displacement, and reproduction as they relate to sexuality, race, and religion categories in imperial contexts. The course spans the early nineteenth century to the present and is framed around global and cross-cultural perspective to analyze how scholars have engaged with sexuality and gender to explore broader themes pertaining to formation of modern empires and colonialism. | GSWS1761401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST1761401 | Gender, World | Global Issues | |||
| HIST 1788-401 | Civilizations at Odds? The United States and the Middle East | Zoe Fallon Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet |
COLL 219 | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | America has often been depicted in the Middle East either as a benevolent superpower or an ill-meaning enemy – in other words, foe or friend, Satan or saint. In America, too, stereotypes of the Middle East abound as home to the uber-wealthy, tyrants, and fanatics. This course will explore the relationship between the United States and the Middle East by moving beyond such facile depictions. We will read works of history and political analysis to shape our understanding of this relationship and to explore cross-cultural perspectives. Our goal is to understand why a century of interaction has sometimes done little to bring peace and greater understanding between these two intertwined communities. By reading a range of historical accounts, we will consider the origins of this cultural and diplomatic encounter. The readings will shed light on the extent of America’s involvement in the Middle East in the twentieth century. We will consider the impact of oil diplomacy on U.S.-Middle East relations, as well as the role of ideology and culture, in an effort to comprehend the antagonism that exists on a state-to-state level in some contexts. Most importantly, we will grapple with the ways in which international politics disrupts the lives of citizens trapped in the throes of political turmoil. | MELC0680401 | History & Tradition Sector | World | Africa/Middle East, Global Issues | ||||
| HIST 2000-301 | History Workshop | Jared Farmer | VANP 629 | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course introduces newly declared History Majors to the History Department and lays the foundation for future coursework, including research seminars, in History. Students will be introduced to various methods used to reconstruct and explain the past in different eras and places. Drawing on the rich resources available at Penn and in the Philadelphia region, students will also learn how to research and write history themselves. Throughout the semester, small research and writing assignments will allow students to try out different approaches and hone their skills as both analysts and writers of history. | Seminar | |||||||
| HIST 2151-301 | History of Baseball, 1840 to the present | Sarah L. H. Gronningsater | VANP 242 | R 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course explores the history of baseball in the United States. It covers, among other topics, the first amateur clubs in the urban North, the professionalization and nationalization of the sport during and after the Civil War era, the rise of fandom, baseball’s relationship to anxieties about manhood and democracy, tensions between labor and management, the Negro Leagues, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Nisei baseball during World War Two, Jackie Robinson and desegregation, and the Latinization of baseball. The history of baseball is, in many respects, the history of the United States writ large as well as the history of the myths that Americans tell about themselves. | American | Seminar, US | ||||||
| HIST 2158-301 | News, Media and American Democracy | Bruce K Lenthall | WILL 318 | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | At separate moments, Thomas Jefferson famously declared both that newspapers were crucial to sustain a nation and that a person who never looked at a newspaper was better informed than a regular reader of the press. The ideal of an informed citizenry occupies a central spot in our understanding of the democratic project in the United States, and, consequently, the news and the media play a vital role. But the news can manipulate and distort as well as inform. As Americans on both the Left and Right wonder today, how does media support or imperil our democratic prospects? In this course we will consider how the changing ways Americans have learned about the world have shaped how they have engaged with it. We will explore the shape, role and impact of media in the United States from the 18th to the 21st centuries. As we examine evolving forms of print, film, radio, television and internet we will consider how Americans have integrated media into their lives, and the contested nature of news, citizenship and democracy. Throughout, we will explore the importance of the different media that conveyed news in the past – and think about what that means for us in the present moment as news travels through new channels. |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST2158301 | American, Political | Seminar, US | |||||
| HIST 2159-401 | The History of Family Separation | Hardeep Dhillon | PWH 108 | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course examines the socio-legal history of family separation in the United States. From the period of slavery to the present-day, the United States has a long history of separating and remaking families. Black, Indigenous, poor, disabled, and immigrant communities have navigated the precarious nature of family separation and the legal regime of local, state, and federal law that substantiated it. In this course, we will trace how families have navigated domains of family separation and the reasoning that compelled such separation in the first place. Through an intersectional focus that embraces race, class, disability, and gender, we will underline who has endured family separation and how such separation has remade the very definition of family in the United States. | AFRC2159401, ASAM2159401, GSWS2159401 | American, Gender | Seminar, US | |||||
| HIST 2161-401 | The Civil Rights Movement | William Sturkey | MCES 105 | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course will examine the classical phase of the African American Civil Rights Movement between the years 1954 and 1968. Focusing primarily on the American South, this class will explore the nature of Jim Crow-era racial segregation and the origins and effects of the massive rise in social protests that fundamentally reshaped race in the United States of America and influenced social and political movements across the world. We will study iconic civil rights campaigns and legendary figures, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1964 Freedom Summer, and Fannie Lou Hamer, while also closely examining the activism of lesser-known actors and analyzing how dramatic racial alterations affected the lives of everyday people. | AFRC2161401 | American, Political | Seminar, US | |||||
| HIST 2162-401 | Beyond 40 Acres and a Mule: History & Practice of Reparations in the African Diaspora (ABCS course) | Breanna Moore | WILL 205 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | How did enslaved people and their descendants conceptualize reparations? What strategies did they employ to achieve them? How do present day movements for reparations seek to address historic harms? This ABCS course will examine the history of reparations advocacy amongst enslaved Africans and their descendants from the inception of the trans-Atlantic traffic in enslaved people to present day. This action-oriented course will explore the root of reparations - repair - and the historical and current strategies that people are employing, both nationally and globally, to advance racial and reparatory justice for descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. By situating reparatory justice initiatives in the context of the African diaspora, the course will examine demands, goals, implementation plans, and organizing methods used by the descendants of enslaved Africans for the harms and legacies of slavery and colonization. Penn students will travel to Science Leadership Academy at Beeber once a week for ten weeks. *History Majors may write a 15-20 page research paper for the final project to fulfill the History Major research requirement.* | AFRC2162401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST2162401 | American | Research, Seminar, US | ||||
| HIST 2355-401 | Classic Icons, Cinematic Images: Popular Culture in the Middle East | Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet | WILL 1 | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | The meaning of culture can sometimes best be understood through a look at its popular traditions and the routines of everyday life. This course will grapple with issues of ethnicity, political conflict, and identity in the Middle East by analyzing the culture produced for and consumed by a wide spectrum of the general public in different countries. Political cartoons, photography, novels, film, music, dance, and other modes of cultural expression will be used to explore the historical roots of the political anxieties and social conventions common to many modern Middle Eastern communities. In this way, we will recast studies of politics through an understanding of identity and culture. | CIMS2355401 | World | Africa/Middle East, Seminar | |||||
| HIST 2700-301 | Utopia | Margo Todd | VANP 627 | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Western thinkers from the ancient Greeks to the present have speculated about what the ideal human society would look like. We can study the resultant utopias as works of literature, philosophy, religion, psychology or political science; we must understand them in their historical contexts. This seminar will take a multidisciplinary approach to utopian thought from Plato's Republic to the ecological utopias of the 1980s. Works to be examined include More's Utopia; seventeenth century scientific utopias like Bacon's New Atlantis; the political theory of Rousseau (Social Contract); essays of the French utopian socialists and Hawthorne's version of the Brook Farm experiment; Morris' News from Nowhere; its American counterpart, Bellamy's Looking Backward; Gilman's feminist blueprint, Herland; BF Skinner's psychological utopia, Walden Two; and the utopian science fiction of LeGuin. Huxley's dystopia, Brave New World, will be set against his later utopia, Island. | European, Intellectual | Europe, Seminar | ||||||
| HIST 2706-301 | Wastes of War: A Century of Destruction | Anne K Berg | COLL 319 | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This seminar examines the human and environmental consequences of violent conflict from the South African War at the beginning of the 20th century to the War on Terror. War violently transforms the social and physical environment. War reshuffles ideologies, reimagines futures and reshapes alliances, destroys bodies, spaces, societies, habitats, ecosystems and cultures. And of course, there’s no war that doesn’t produce a whole host of wastes, and as a result, inspires a multitude of strategies to combat and eradicate them. In this course, we approach war as an engine of destruction and transformation rather than as politics gone awry. The wastes of war will serve as our focal point as we study the new worlds (technological, social and environmental) that war not merely leaves in its wake but systematically generates. Critically examining two key categories – “waste” and “war” in tandem, we discover how together they fundamentally restructure our social, cultural and natural worlds in unexpected ways. | World | Global Issues, Seminar | ||||||
| HIST 2710-401 | Inflationary Times: Money, Currency, and Debt in History | Melissa Teixeira | VANP 124 | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | What is inflation? What are its causes and consequences? Inflation has become a pressing concern recently, as prices of fuel, food, and consumer goods have ticked upwards at alarming rates. From the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and climate disasters, current inflationary pressures are inseparable from the major events disrupting the global economy. This is as much the case today as it was following the discovery of silver mines in Potosí (Bolivia), the French Revolution, the breakdown of Bretton Woods, or the 1980s debt crises in Latin America. This course explores the economic and social consequences of inflation across history. It also considers the economic models used to explain the rise and fall of prices—and how economists and policy-makers experiment with new formulas when old ones appear obsolete. By exploring inflationary moments in historical perspective, this seminar explores topics like the political and social meanings of money, how to build trust in a new currency, and what governments can do (or tried to do) to correct financial crisis. Students will be asked to explore past moments of financial and economic crises on their own terms, but also to look for how the past can offer lessons for the present. | LALS2710401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST2710401 | Economic, World | Global Issues, Seminar | ||||
| HIST 3150-401 | The Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans | Eiichiro Azuma | DRLB 3C8 | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This research seminar will consist of a review of representative studies on the Japanese American internment, and a discussion of how social scientists and historians have attempted to explain its complex backgrounds and causes. Through the careful reading of academic works, primary source materials, and visualized narratives (film productions), students will learn the basic historiography of internment studies, research methodologies, and the politics of interpretation pertaining to this particular historical subject. Students will also examine how Japanese Americans and others have attempted to reclaim a history of the wartime internment from the realm of “detached” academia in the interest of their lives in the “real” world, and for a goal of “social justice” in general. The class will critically probe the political use of history and memories of selected pasts in both Asian American community and contemporary American society through the controversial issue of the Japanese American internment. | ASAM2100401 | Cultural Diviserity in the U.S. | American, Diplomatic | Research, Seminar, US | ||||
| HIST 3165-401 | Slavery, Freedom, and the U.S. Civil War | Francis A Russo | WILL 723 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of the Civil War as a landmark event in the making of the modern United States, and indeed, the modern world. In addition to destroying slavery and the slaveholding class within the United States, the era introduced enduring dilemmas: What is the legacy of slavery in U.S. history and contemporary life? Who is entitled to citizenship in the United States? How do radical social movements relate to democratic political change? What is the nature of liberty in a “free” capitalist society? What do freedom and equality mean in concrete terms? Far from a straightforward transition from slavery to freedom, the story of the U.S. nineteenth century is much more complex: the Union victory in the Civil War eradicated slavery from American life but left it to future generations, including our own, to confront the legacies of slavery and to probe the meaning of freedom and to give it substance. This seminar explores enduring paradoxes of slavery and freedom through an in-depth historical analysis of the causes, course, and consequences of the U.S. Civil War. Topics include the place of slavery in the Federal Constitution, the spread of the cotton kingdom, Jacksonian democracy and the Market Revolution, ideologies of slavery and freedom, the rise of antislavery and proslavery politics, the growing social and economic divisions between North and South, the sectional crisis leading to war, the course and consequences of Northern military victory, emancipation, and the Reconstruction Amendments. We pay attention to these large-scale historical developments while also studying the individual experiences of statesmen and ordinary Americans, women as well as men, the enslaved as well as the free. | AFRC3165401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST3165401 | American, Political | Research, Seminar, US | ||||
| HIST 3315-301 | Maritime Encounters: Merchants, Captives, and Corsairs in the Mediterranean World 1500-1800 | Lama Elsharif | COLL 217 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Spanning the waters between Europe, Africa, and Asia, the Mediterranean was a hub of commerce, a battleground for corsairs, and a space where captives were exchanged and empires clashed. In this seminar, we will examine how interactions in the early modern period shaped the region’s political, economic, and social landscapes from diverse perspectives. Special attention will be given to the often-overlooked histories of the eastern Mediterranean and North African coasts, where diverse groups of peoples of different faiths interacted extensively with the rest of the region. Throughout the course, we will delve into the expansion of maritime empires, the ebb and flow of corsairing activities, and the conflicts over trade routes that connected distant shores. We will also examine personal narratives of captives, traders, and corsairs to understand how these encounters fostered cultural exchange and shaped social dynamics across the region. Select classes will be held at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, where students will engage directly with primary collections and historical maps from the era. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to identify and discuss key historical developments of Mediterranean history essential for understanding the region’s modern realities. They will also refine their skills in historical analysis by critically evaluating primary sources and secondary literature to form well-rounded interpretations of the past. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST3315301 | Diplomatic, Economic, World | Africa/Middle East, pre-1800, Research, Seminar | |||||
| HIST 3603-401 | Do Books Make Revolutions? Writing, Publishing and Reading in Early Modern Europe and the Americas | Roger Chartier John Pollack |
VANP 605 | M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | In this course we will consider the writing, publication, and reading of texts created on both sides of the Atlantic in early modern times, from the era of Gutenberg to that of Franklin, and in many languages. The seminar will be held in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts in Van Pelt Library and make substantial use of its exceptional, multilingual collections, including early manuscripts, illustrated books, plays marked for performance, and censored books. Any written or printed object can be said to have a double nature: both textual and material. We will introduce this approach and related methodologies: the history of the book; the history of reading; connected history; bibliography; and textual criticism. We will focus on particular case studies and also think broadly about the global history of written culture, and about relations between scribal and print culture, between writing and reading, between national traditions, and between what is and what is not “literature.” We encourage students with diverse linguistic backgrounds to enroll. As part of the seminar, students will engage in a research project which can be based in the primary source collections of the Kislak Center. History Majors or Minors may use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, or Latin America geographic requirement if that region is the focus of their research paper. | COML3603401, ENGL2603401 | American, European, Intellectual | Europe, pre-1800, Research, Seminar, US | |||||
| HIST 3605-301 | Building the British Empire, 1500-1800 | Hannah Kaemmer | MCES 105 | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain constructed a global empire that extended across Asia, Africa, and the Americas and transformed built environments around the world. This discussion-based seminar explores the diverse and varying architectures of the early modern British Empire to investigate how colonialism and imperialism have shaped the physical environments we experience today. Rather than focusing on the global influence of “British” architecture, we will look at building types—including forts and harbors, houses and plantations, ships and schools—that emerged from the often violent encounters between colonists, Indigenous peoples, and enslaved and formerly enslaved people. By creating loose groupings around building “types,” the course invites cross-geographical investigation; we will discuss trends across time and place as well as the specific cultural, environmental, and political contexts that produced divergences. Throughout, we will seek to answer the questions: How did architectural forms and practices both facilitate and resist Britain’s colonial expansion? How can we use the built environment to recover histories not recorded in colonial documents? In addition to primary sources at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, we will use the architectural fabric of Philadelphia to investigate these questions. |
https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST3605301 | European, World | Europe, pre-1800, Research, Seminar | |||||
| HIST 3700-401 | Abolitionism: A Global History | Roquinaldo Ferreira | WILL 202 | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This class develops a transnational and global approach to the rise of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. In a comparative framework, the class traces the rise of abolitionism in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, examining the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, the rise of colonialism in Africa, and the growth of forced labor in the wake of transatlantic slave trade. We will deal with key debates in the literature of African, Atlantic and Global histories, including the causes and motivations of abolitionism, the relationship between the suppression of the slave trade and the growth of forced labor in Africa, the historical ties between abolitionism and the early stages of colonialism in Africa, the flow of indentured laborers from Asia to the Americas in the wake of the slave trade. This class is primarily geared towards the production of a research paper. *Depending on the research paper topic, History Majors and Minors can use this course to fulfill the US, Europe, Latin America or Africa requirement.* | AFRC3700401, LALS3700401 | American, Diplomatic, European, World | Africa/Middle East, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, Research, Seminar, US | |||||
| HIST 3710-401 | Introduction to Business, Economic and Financial History | Marc R Flandreau | DRLB 3N6 | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | Business, Economic and Financial History plays a crucial role today in informing the views of business leaders, policy makers, reformers and public intellectuals. This seminar provides students with the opportunity to acquire a command of the key elements of this important intellectual field. The seminar format enables us to do this engagingly through reading and discussion. Students acquire a knowledge of the fundamental texts and controversies. Each meeting focuses on one foundational debate and provides a means to be up to date with the insights gleaned from rigorous economic history. We will examine twelve important debates and students will be asked to write a paper. The debates will include such questions as: What is growth and how can it be measured? What caused the "great divergence" in long run development among countries? How can we "understand" the rise and fall of slavery and its long shadow today? What is globalization and when did it begin? Did the Gold Standard and interwar fiscal and monetary policy orthodoxy cause the great depression? How can we explain the evolution of inequality in the very long run? | ECON0625401 | Economic | Global Issues, Research, Seminar | |||||
| HIST 3921-001 | European International Relations 1914-present | Thomas Richard Bull Mark Castillo Walter A Mcdougall |
PCPE AUD | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | This course looks at Europe's interactions with other world regions throughout the twentieth century. Over the course of roughly a hundred years, Europeans have shaped the fates of peoples living beyond the western world, for instance through the impact of two world wars, European colonialism, and the global Cold War. At the same time, European societies 'at home' were not left unaffected by these interactions. Even today, Europeans are facing the legacies of some of these histories in immigration and the politics of religion and secularism for example. The past century also saw a dramatic shift in Europe's position in the world - from dominance to a loss of influence in the shadow of the United States and more recently, China. The course spends significant time covering the histories of world regions other than Europe. It furthermore considers some interactions and exchanges between world regions from a social and cultural point of view. Because the class spans roughtly a century, the content has to remain introductory and general, although a very basic familiarity with 20th-century international history is helpful. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST3921001 | Diplomatic, European, Political | Europe | |||||
| HIST 3923-401 | Twentieth Century European Intellectual History | Warren G. Breckman | MEYH B4 | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | European intellectual and cultural history from 1870 to 1950. Themes to be considered include aesthetic modernism and the avant-garde, the rebellion against rationalism and positivism, Social Darwinism, Second International Socialism, the impact of World War One on European intellectuals, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and the ideological origins of fascism. Figures to be studied include Nietzsche, Freud, Woolf, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. | COML3923401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST3923401 | European, Intellectual | Europe | ||||
| HIST 4997-301 | Junior Honors in History | Sophia A Rosenfeld | MCES 105 | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Open to junior honors candidates in history. Introduction to the study and analysis of historical phenomena. Emphasis on theoretical approaches to historical knowledge, problems of methodology, and introduction to research design and strategy. Objective of this seminar is the development of honors thesis proposal. | ||||||||
| HIST 5600-640 | MLA Proseminar: The Great War in Memoir and Memory | Warren G. Breckman | CANCELED | Graduate-level history seminar offered through the Master of Liberal Arts program. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST5600640 | ||||||||
| HIST 6100-301 | Topics in US History: US Empire/US in the World | Amy C Offner | COLL 319 | T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Reading and discussion course on selected topics in US history. | ||||||||
| HIST 6200-301 | Topics in European History: Soviet History | Benjamin Nathans | VANP 626 | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Reading and Discussion course on selected topics in European History. | ||||||||
| HIST 6220-301 | Topics in Early Mod European Hist: Connected Textual Histories 15-18th C | Roger Chartier | VANP 605 | T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Connected Textual Histories 15-18th Centuries. Concepts and Methods in Cultural History This seminar will be devoted to a critical examination of a series of notions that are fundamental in modern historical writing. Such an approach will allow us to look at the mutations of historical research since the mid-twentieth century, to reflect on the relations between history and other disciplines (anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, history of art, etc.) and to analyze the models of intelligibility that frame historical interpretations. It will focus on the Early Modern period (but not exclusively) and be based on reading methodological essays, historical case studies and primary texts. It will deal with historiographical perspectives developed not only in the English-speaking academic world but also in France, Germany, Spain, or Italy. Its aim is to propose a series of readings that can be considered as a part of the mental “library” necessary for any scholar working today in Humanities and Social Sciences. It will also make large and frequent uses of the rare books and manuscripts collections of the Library. |
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| HIST 6330-301 | Topics in Modern Asian History: Modern Japanese History | Frederick R. Dickinson | COHN 203 | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Modern Asian History. | ||||||||
| HIST 6400-301 | Topics in Middle Eastern History: Ends of Empire | Secil Yilmaz | COLL 217 | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | This course introduces an analytical and conceptual approach to the study of empire, modern imperialism and the ends of empires in the 19th and 20th centuries with a geographical and conceptual emphasis on “the Balkans to Bengal” complex. The seminar will focus on the comparative and competing histories of the British, French, Russian, Austria-Hungarian Empires along with Qajar Iran with an emphasis on the end of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of post-Ottoman East to analyze the matters pertaining to territoriality, international law, property regimes, legal reforms, religion, secularism, feminism, and formation of the institutions of imperial governance. The seminar invites students to conceptually examine the history of empire and imperialism as complex elements of historical shift in property regimes, class conflicts, legal reforms and formation of modern institutions of incarceration, embodied surveillance as well as exploitation of labor globally and in an engagement with the “Eastern Question.” It offers an analysis of the history of empire and imperialism practices of everyday life in an entanglement with capitalism, colonization, and political domination across class, race, and sexual differences. In the second half of the course, we will explore the political, social, and cultural implications of the rise of modern imperial regimes, constitutional monarchies, formation of new [mandate] nation-states, the question of settler colonialism, decolonization and the lasting impacts of imperial legacies in the 20th century. Through a combination of seminar discussion, primary source analysis, and comparative case studies, the course will also address the legacies of empires in the modern world, considering issues of identity, power dynamics, and globalization. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST6400301 | |||||||
| HIST 6620-301 | Topics in Colonial-Era Latin American | Marcy Norton | WILL 320 | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Colonial Latin American and Caribbean history | ||||||||
| HIST 7000-301 | Proseminar in History | Joshua Teplitsky | MCES 105 | M 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Weekly readings, discussions, and writing assignments to develop a global perspective within which to study human events in various regional/cultural milieus, c. 1400 to the present. This course is required for all PhD students, and is taken in the first year of study. | ||||||||
| HIST 7230-301 | Research Seminar in Mod European History: Politics & Intellectuals in Mod Europe | Warren G. Breckman | COLL 217 | W 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Research seminar on selected topics in Modern European history. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=HIST7230301 |