To nineteenth-century Americans, the Civil War or the “Second American Revolution” was the most transformative event of their lives. Over 750,000 people were killed; the southern economy was destroyed; and—perhaps most consequentially—4 million enslaved people gained their freedom. This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War, from the nation's founding to 1877 — the end of Reconstruction. Five broad themes are closely interrogated: 1) the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; 2) slavery, race, and emancipation as national problem, personal experience, and social process; 3) the experience of modern, total war for individuals and society; 4) the political and social challenges of Reconstruction; 5) and the memory and mis-memory of civil war and emancipation.

This course explores the political, social, and cultural history of the antebellum American South, with an emphasis on the history of Black slavery and how it shaped every aspect of this society. Topics include race, race making, and racism; slave community and resistance; gender roles; commodity production; capitalism; disease and climate; the Native South; white southern honor and political cultures; the Civil War; and the region’s place in national memory.

This course is an intensive exploration of major issues in the history of race and ethnicity, spanning time and space, with a focus on East Asia and the Americas. The class approaches race and ethnicity from an historical perspective, investigating shifting patterns of group formation, ethnoracial relations, ethnopolitics, race-making, and racism, genocide, appropriation, culture, as well as shifting conceptions of identity, belonging, and exclusion. In this course, terms such as “race” and “ethnicity” will be considered as historically specific configurations that emerge, morph, and sometimes transform reality, and not as a priori concepts that stand above history or before analysis.

This course is a survey of nineteenth-century American history. Topics include: the legacy of the American Revolution; the invention of political parties; capitalist transformation and urbanization; the spread of evangelical Christianity; antebellum reform; changing conceptions of gender, sex, and family; territorial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and Manifest Destiny; the politics and experience of Indian removal; slavery and emancipation; the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption; the crises and corruption of the Gilded Age; the Populist insurgency; Chinese exclusion; allotment and reservation life; and the emergence of the United States as a modern nation state.

This course examines the “Age of Revolutions.” This term is one of the most enduring period markers known to modern historians – an age of popular upheavals in economics, industry, politics, and civil rights that echoed across the globe. We focus on the secessionist independence of the American Revolution, the anti-aristocratic and anti-monarchical decapitation of the Old Regime in the French Revolution, and—most of all—the Haitian Revolution, which overthrew both imperial-French and white planter rule on St. Domingue. Taken together, these events reshaped hemispheric definitions of citizenship, sovereignty, and empire. But could republican principles—color-blind in rhetoric—be so in fact? How radical were these events? How connected were they? Would republicanism be open to people of all races? To women? How did the industrial revolution impact ideologies of class, race, and gender? Can we reconcile the age of revolution with an age of slavery?

How can we understand the events, ideas, and conflicts that have featured in the news cycle during the past year? “The History of 2021” offers historically informed reflections on this year’s momentous events, providing an opportunity to understand our world in its historic context. Each week will feature a different History faculty member speaking on a major news topic of the year, showing what we can learn by approaching it from a historical perspective. The course is open to all students (newcomers and history veterans alike) who want to reflect on the challenges and opportunities of 2021, and who are curious to consider how studying history can offer a deeper and richer understanding of tumultuous times.

This is a readings course designed to familiarize students with recent literature, topics, and genres in the history of the United States during the Nineteenth Century. Inevitably, some books will include sections of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, but our focus will be on the nineteenth. In part due to the field’s expansion, this course is organized thematically, highlighting different topics, debates, or methods—so-called “problems”— that have structured its study. To offer the broadest exposure, readings cover a diverse range of topics and feature a blend of newer and older work.

Between 1500 and 1900, about 12 million people were forcibly removed from Africa and transported to the Americas to work as enslaved laborers. This course explores the history of racial slavery in the Atlantic world and its lasting significance, from its onset in the sixteenth century, to the late 1880s (when Cuba and Brazil became the last Atlantic societies to abolish slavery), to today as slavery’s legacies still reverberate globally in politics, economics, and culture.