Spring 2019 Courses

HI 103 Medieval Europe

Erica Bastress-Dukehard | 3 credits

The formation of Europe: from the breakdown of Roman political authority in the West in the 4^th century to the rise of national states and their conflicts in the 14^th.

Note(s): Fulfills Social Sciences requirement.

HI 126 Revolution to Civil War

Eric Morser | 3 credits

A grand tour of United States history from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Students investigate the challenge of nation building, the contested rise of American democracy, the economic transformation of the United States, battles to control the western frontier, and the growing conflict over slavery that eventually tore the nation apart.

Note(s): Fulfills Social Sciences requirment.

HI 144 East Asian Civilization

Jenny Day | 3 credits

An introductory survey of East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) from its earliest history to the end of the Mongol Empire in the 1300s. Students will explore the formation of Confucianism as an ideology, the changes in social and political institutions across East Asia, ideas and practives concerning gender and the family, religion and beliefs of elites and ordinary peple, and intercultural exchanges and conflicts within East Asia.

Note(s): Fulfills Non-Western Culture and Social Sciences requirements.

HI 145 Making of the Modern Middle East

Murat C. Yildiz | 3 credits

An exploration of the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the modern Middle East in a global and comparative historical context. Students will examine the reorganization of state-society relations, the creation of modern governmental institutions, the construction of new social and political conceptualizations, and the state's growing involvement in the politics of population management in the Ottoman Emprie and Qajar Iran. Students will also explore the processes and practices that were central to the production of the Middle East as both a physical space as well as a discursive concept.

Note(s): Fulfills the Non-Western Culture and Social Sciences requirements.

HI 151 The Cold War

MatthewHockenos | 3 credits

Ths course examines the U.S.-Soviet rivalry after 1945 – known as the Cold War – from a European and global perspective. In addition to addressing the nuclear arms race and the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States, attention will be given to how the Cold War ignited deadly conflicts in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Our starting point will be the division of Europe at the end of the Second World War and the formation of the Eastern and the Western Blocs under Soviet and American hegemony. In the European context we examine the occupation and division of Germany; the Marshall Plan; everyday life behind the Iron Curtain; the Prague Spring; and the revolutions across Eastern Europe that brought down the communist regimes. In the global context we examin the Korean War; the Cuban Missle Crisis; the Vietnam War, and the emergence of China as a superpower. We end the course by examining the explosion of nationalism in Yugoslav states after the fall of communism and the ethnic cleansing and genocide that takes place there in the 1990s.

HI 230W History through Travel: Latin America

Jordana Dym | 4 credits

An examination of the ideas and impact of European and North American travel narratives on historical knowledge of Latin America and the Caribbean from the 16^th through the early 20^th centuries. Students examine accounts by conquerors, diplomats, pirates, scientists, missionaries, and tourists to consider what questions and analytical methods allow for interpretation of the factual or fictional elements in these important sources for the creation of historical knowledge about travelers, their values, the lands they visited, and the people, environments, and cultures they described.

Note(s): Fulfills Social Sciences requirement. Fulfills expository writing requirment.

HI 243P Leisure and Fun in the Middle East

Murat C. Yildiz | 4 credits

The 19^th and 20^th centuries were periods in which men and women in the Middle East developed new notions of time, carved out larger spaces for themselves in the expanding public sphere, created novel activities, and experimented with different mood – and mind – molding substances. Through close readings of secondary and primary sources (including photographs, films, novels, and memoirs), we will examine a number of urban transformations related to leisure and pleasure, including: drugs, tobacco, coffee houses, reading rooms, alcohol, prostitution, public transportation, vernacular photographs, and sports. By creating new narratives around leisure activities, pleasure, and fun, students are able to cultivate a more textured and multidimensional understanding of the making of modernity in the Middle East.

HI 251D Sea Tales

Erica Bastress-Dukehart and Tillman Nechtman | 4 credits

Topically organized courses based on problems and issues of special interest at the intermediate level. The specific themes to be examined will vary from year to year.

Note(s): Fulfills Social Sciences requirement.

HI 258P European Facism

Matthew Hockenos | 4 credits

What is facism? What is the appeal of an ideology that advocates intolerance, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and war? What were the roots of facism and how did facism manifest itself in Europe in the middle of the 20^th century? The current popularity of far-right populist parties and politicians in Europe and elsewhere makes these quesstions all the more urgent today. This course examines the origins, nature, and history of facism in Europe between the two world wars and its recent reappearance across Europe.

HI 264P American West

Eric Morser | 4 credits

An exploration of the complex and contested history of the American West. Key themes include contact and conflict among different people on the western borderlands, western migration annd settlement, the role of government in the West, ongoing frontier conflicts over control of natural resources, and links between the West and American identity.

Note(s): Fulfills Social Sciences requirement.

HI275 Introduction to the History Major

Jennifer Delton | 1 credit

An introduction to the aims of the history major.

Note(s): A prerequisite for the Colloquium. Required for all majors and interdepartmental majors, to be taken in the sophomore or junior years. Open to non-majors with permission of instructor.

HI 325P Public History

Tillman Nechtman | 4 credits

Most people encounter the past every day without setting foot in a history classroom, whether through reading a placard in a historic city center, updating a family recipe, or watching "History Detectives" on TV. Much of this past is mediated by public historians, people who apply the historian's skills of writing, research, and presentation to engage a popular audience. This course considers the distinctive practices of history "on the hoof" both within Saratoga Springs, as well as in national and international settings.

We will read relevant literature and discuss how public historians craft different versions of the past; how governments and institutions construct and disseminate historic narratives; portrayals of the past in popular culture, including newspapers, television and film; and how private groups, including families and museums, preserve individual and collective heritage and memory. Students will evaluate museum exhibits, historic sites, events, and archives.

In addition, students in this class will work in teams on a larger public history project. This semester's project will be an oral interview effort to collect the memories of alumni of Skidmore's now-closed Nursing Program. In an effort to preserve our own institutional memory, students will be asked to reach out to and to interview the alumni of this program with an eye towards developing a program to share with nursing alumni over reunion weekend early in the summer.

HI 345P The Body in the Middle East

Murat C. Yildiz | 4 credits

The course will focus on the ways in which the Middle East's experience during the modern period featured important shifts in understandings and practices of the body. Students will consider how modern institutions, like schools, the army, the hospital, civis associations, and the press, played a transformative role in creating, inculcating, and spreading radically reconfigured understandings of the body throughout the modern Middle East.

HI 351D 001 History and Cartography

Jordana Dym | 4 credits

Historians have long used maps to track or illustrate political developments. More recently, the study of the history of cartography invites us to consider these graphic texts as primary sources important for their role in making history as well as depicting historical fact.  In this class, we will engage interdisciplinary scholarship in history, geography, and art history to understand how maps can reveal something about not only the peoples, spaces, and times they portray, but also the societies that create and consume them. Then, we will apply the course's analytical approaches on individual or collaborative research. Topics covered my include map production and consumption; local, imperial, national, and world mapping; maps and travel; ideas of space and place; cartographic lies; cartographic literacy; and other themes.

HI 351D 002 Ancient Warfare

Michael Arnush | 4 credits

In the Greek and Roman worlds, warfare was commonplace. Most communities were more often at war than at peace. Even the pax Romana, or "Roman peace," that some Roman emperors claimed to have instituted, witnessed horrific and brutal military engagements. War gave birth to Athenian democracy and to the Roman Republic and Empire, and it provides the backdrop for Homer's Illiad, many of the great tragedies and comedies from Athens, and Vergil's Aaeneid, both as a motif and for us toguage its social impact. Students in this seminar will examine (and on occasion reproduce in 3-D) the mechanics of warfare in classical antiquity – tactics, strategy, weapons, and machines – and as well the effects and costs of waging war, on the Greeks, Romans, and other cultures in the ancient Mediterranean. We will also screen a few films that attempt to capture how the ancients waged war.

Note(s): This course counts towards the Classics and History majors and is a History Research (R) course.

HI 351D 003 East Asia and the West

Jenny Day | 4 credits

This course examines the interactions between the Euro-American powers and China and Japan in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Topics include the mutual influences between East Asia and the West in the cultural, social, and political realms, the selective adaptation of Western ideas as the Chinese and Japanese people struggled to define modernity and nationhood in the 20^th century, and social and cultural movements in respond to imperialism and colonialism. Students will analyze visual and textual primary sources to make sense of how East Asian traditions were reinterpreted and reinvented during this period of modern transformation, and develop a critical understanding of imperialism, colonial-modernity, and nationalism.

Note(s): This course counts towards the History major, and is a History Research (R) course.

HI 398C The Quest

Erica Bastress-Dukehard | 4 credits

Honor, Courage, Humility, Community, Mysteries, Intrigues, Alliances, Chivalry, Coded Messages, Miracles, Dragons, and, of course, The Quest for the Holy Grail.