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Courses

The following courses are only offered for the 2024-2025 academic semesters. For the regular course descriptions, prerequisite requirements and additional notations, please refer to the official undergraduate calendar

A note concerning HISW classes: A new curriculum that comes into effect in the Fall 2022 term will include for all History program students the introductory HIST 200, a First Year Seminar that takes a “deep dive” into a historical subject. These small classes, each taught by one of the department’s professors, both explore the focused topic of the course and introduce students to historical skills: how historians make arguments, how they use historical evidence and other scholars’ writing, and how they communicate their ideas. There are several sections of HIST 200 offered in each of the Fall and Winter term, each with a different topic. The other History Major requirements ask students to take courses at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels and to explore different fields of history through breadth requirements.

Summer 2024

HIST 394/Summer – GA  
Food in History

This course explores the modern history of food as a story of industrialization and globalization. It focuses mainly on North America and the U.S in the 18th-20th centuries. Lectures, readings, & discussions will emphasize the historical dimensions of—and debates about—domesticated and wild ingredients; slave plantations & factory farm labor; agricultural science; industrial processing & technologies of food preservation; the vagaries of nutrition; commodity chains; the politics of food surpluses, food deserts, & famines; and the emergence of ‘fast food’ and ‘slow food.’  The core concern of the 3-week course in Summer 2024 will be on understanding history of food markets, especially the unprecedented nature of supermarkets. Class time will be divided among varied activities, including brief lectures (sometimes by invited experts), discussion of readings, local field trips, small group activities, or hands-on workshops.

 

HIST 302/Summer - AA
The Invasion of America

This course examines the interaction of European colonists with the first peoples of eastern North America before 1800. The emphasis is on cultural exchanges between colonists and Indigenous peoples in the areas of religion, trade, diplomacy, and warfare.

HIST 498 Special Topics: Sites of Violence and their Communities

Dr. Erica Lehrer
Dates: May 30 to June 8 2024
If you are interested in applying, please consult important information.

This site-based, 3-credit interdisciplinary field school will introduce students first hand to the “social lives” of key sites of Holocaust history and memory in the city of Kraków, Poland (and selected other sites). We will together explore how the state, community groups, and creative practitioners of “memory work,” make use of and (often critically) re-interpret sites of wartime violence for a variety of purposes. We will also consider the effects of a range of forces – from government attempts to legislate memory, to heritage tourism, to natural and environmental factors – on the changing shapes and meanings of memory sites.

Using Kraków as a home base, we will read and discuss key scholarly texts (sometimes with their authors), hear guest lectures, visit historical sites (German Nazi camps, former Jewish districts, monuments, and museums), and meet local artists and activists working to activate and expand Polish memory culture against social and political pressures to forget. We will attend to both conventional and less-commonly acknowledged social and material processes that influence remembering in post-conflict sites, and think about past violence in terms of new social formations and pressures (e.g. ethno-racial diversification and activism, migration and climate crises). The goal of this field school is to transform the way you think about how societies remember.

Professor Erica Lehrer (History, Sociology-Anthropology) will lead the group to a range of historical sites (German Nazi camps, former Jewish districts, monuments, and museums), and meet local artists and activists who have worked to activate and expand Polish memory culture against social and political pressures to forget. We will attend to both conventional and less-commonly acknowledged social and material processes that influence remembering in post-conflict sites.

Fall 2024

Descriptions TBA:

 

HIST 200/2 – A
Introduction to History: Abortion – A global History

 

HIST 200/2 – B
Introduction to History: Food Histories/The Middle East

 

HIST 200/2 – C
Introduction to History: Chinatown: A global History

This first-year seminar introduces students to the global history of Chinese diaspora. The class visits major Chinatowns in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, exploring their histories both as global phenomena and unique local products, all intertwined with foodways, tourism, and gentrification as well as the politics of race, gender, and class/labor. Students will read a variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from different disciplines and present their findings on various occasions both orally and in writing. The final destination will be Montreal’s own Chinatown, which students will approach not only as a subject but also as an evolving archive for historical research. A field trip, including a food scavenger hunt, is scheduled.

HIST 202/2 – XX
Modern Europe

This course introduces students to the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, as well as providing some grounding in historical method and the development of a critical historical mind.

 

HIST 203/2 – A
Canada: Pre-Confederation

A survey of Canadian history, from settlement to Confederation, emphasizing readings and discussions on selected problems.

 

HIST 206/2 – A
Medieval Europe

A survey of the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, from the fifth century to the 15th century, with consideration of political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious developments.

 

HIST 208/2 – X
History of the Balkans

This course surveys the history of Europe through the Balkans (a region consisting of present-day Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Montenegro, Kosovo/Kosova, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia), from the premodern period to the present day. Emphasis is placed on the cultural diversity of the region and its impact on peace and conflict. Topics include the rise and fall of empires, economic change, religious transformation, violence, and the impact of ideologies such as nationalism, democracy, fascism, and communism.

 

HIST 242/2 – A
History of the Middle East

This course surveys the history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present.  It traces broadly the formation of an Islamic World over a millennium and follows its engagements with modernity, examining closely the shift from the overarching paradigm of the multi-ethnic/multilinguistic Ottoman Empire to that of the mono ethnic/monolinguistic modern nation state.  This course covers the political history of the region including the experience of British and French colonialism, the rise of nationalist movements, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and focuses on its social, intellectual, and cultural history.

 

HIST 251/2 – XB
History of the US to the Civil War Era

This course surveys American history from the period preceding European contact to the aftermath of the Civil War. It will focus particularly on the encounter between Indigenous North Americans, Africans and Europeans in the Atlantic basin, and the imprint that this encounter left on the political, social, cultural and religious character of the United States. Topics covered may include: slavery and the origins of racism, the rise and fall of the First British Empire, the forging of American nationalism, the growth of democratic politics and spread of reform movements, the rise of industry, and the causes and conduct of the American Civil War.

 

HIST 262/2 – A
History of China

A survey of China’s history from earliest times to the modern era.

 

HIST 263/2 – AA
History of Japan

This course surveys Japan’s history from earliest times to the modern era. In addition to tracing political developments, it explores other themes such as the changing role of the samurai in history and the evolution of Japanese art, literature, and popular culture.

 

HIST 264/2 – A
History of Africa

This course is an introductory survey of the history of Africa from the earliest times to the present. Together we will trace the complex social, political, cultural and economic processes that have shaped the continent’s varied history. African history is one that has been entwined with, and critical to, world history in fundamental ways, but this centrality has too often been disavowed. In addition to examining the major phenomena of the African historical experience – including the development of pre-colonial kingdoms and trans-Saharan trade, the Atlantic slave trade, European imperial conquest, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the victories of independence, and more recent challenges such as the anti-apartheid struggle – we will explore how varied groups of African women and men, peasants and workers, rulers and ruled, lived these changes.

 

HIST 285/2 – A
Introduction to Law and Society

Law influences all aspects of life in society, from resolving conflicts to structuring family or commercial relationships to controlling crime to allocating property. This interdisciplinary course examines the roles law plays in Canada and internationally, from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Cross listed with POLI/ANTH/SOCI 285.

 

HIST 298/2 – A
Special Topics in History: Environmental History

Environmental conflicts, 'green' activism, and popular and scientific alarm over species extinctions, climate change, and the exhaustion of natural resources are global phenomena.  This class will help you understand these issues in historical perspective over the long term, from the last ice age to the present.  We will survey some of the major themes and problems in interactions between human societies and their environments in the past, considering changes in climates, landscapes, and biological communities of microorganisms, plants, and animals in many places around the world.  Topics include ideas about nature, climate history, the environmental consequences of colonization, disease environments, agricultural and landscape change, the environmental impact of science and technology, the unprecedented expansion of human population and urban environments, the origins of pollution, the politics of nature conservation, and environmental injustice.  The course will include lectures but will emphasize reading, writing, and class discussion. 

HIST 306/2 – A

History and the Public

This course is an examination of the practice of history outside the academy and an introduction to the critical analysis of presentations of history in public and popular culture. Topics include archives, corporate and popular history, museums and historic sites, preservation, film and television, theme parks, and anniversary commemorations. A special emphasis is placed on public controversies and ethical dilemmas involving historical interpretations.

 

HIST 307/2 – A
History of Montreal

A survey of the history of Montreal from pre-European times to the contemporary period.  The course will explore the key transformations that have shaped this city and cover important subjects such as Montreal's place in the world, its economy, social organization, cultures, and the built environment.  Students will engage in a range of activities designed to provide a broad overview, organized around the central theme of Place and Space, and to introduce more specific themes, such as health, leisure, diversity, religion, and modernity.  Most of the lectures will take a particular place as a point of entry into specific periods, trends, events, and themes in the history of the city.  Several will be presented by guest speakers, each of whom is a prominent scholar engaged in cutting-edge research on the history of Montreal.  We will also venture beyond the classroom for a least two urban-history excursions, including an exploration of Old Montreal and a walking tour of the 20th-century downtown core.

 

HIST 315/2 – A
Rights and Freedoms in Canadian History

Rights and Freedoms in Canadian Society - Since the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, Canada has played a leading role in the articulation and interpretation of fundamental rights and freedoms.  Our contemporary culture of rights has a long history, however, and is not without its critics.  In this course we will study both the historical development of fundamental rights and freedoms in Canada and various contemporary debates about rights culture in Canada, particularly as the Charter has been defined and interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada.  This course is conceived as a law and society rather than a history course, and so readings and assignments will include both historical and legal approaches.

 

HIST 336/2 – A
Deviancy & Orthodoxy/Mexican History

In both the colonial and post-colonial eras, the Mexican state—as well as other powerful institutions like the church—developed changing notions of socially deviant groups in order to reinforce normative behaviour. Through the examination of historical and historiographical writings and primary sources, this course examines the construction of social orthodoxy over time, following a roughly chronological structure, by examining evolving conceptions of various deviant groups including heretics, prostitutes, criminals, bandits, political dissenters, and cross dressers. How did ideas about deviancy change across time? Why did these groups threaten the Mexican state? What other influences did they exert?

 

HIST 344/2 – A
Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia

This course is an introduction to the history of the two Yugoslav states that existed during the twentieth century (1918-1941 and 1945-1992), both of which came to an end in wars characterized by large-scale violence. The attempt to create viable states in this culturally diverse part of Europe resulted in the experimentation with nearly every type of political system and ideology: from constitutional monarchy to dictatorship, from fascism to communism. A basic objective of this course is for students to acquire a critical understanding of the long- and short-term historical factors that made possible both long periods of inter-communal peace and short periods of extreme discord in this part of the world. Students will explore the region’s history through class lectures and the reading of a modest amount of scholarly literature. The bulk of critical reading, however, will be primary sources. These will include a short travel account, a major work of literature and a short story, a piece of contemporary historical journalism, and a documentary film. As the course unfolds, we will focus on a vexing question: What led many residents of the south Slavic lands, who shared so much in common, and who found ways to live together in peace for sizable periods of time, to choose in certain moments of dramatic historical change to engage in mass violence against each other?

 

HIST 351/2 – A
England in the Reign of Henrry VIII

This course examines English history in the first half of the 16th century. In addition to specifically examining the personality and politics of Henry VIII himself, lectures and assignments examine broader social, religious, economic, and legal developments in the kingdom during his reign.


HIST 370/2 – A
Japanese Popular Culture

This course traces the history of Japanese popular culture from the 1600s to the present, with emphasis on the last 50 years.  The major focus is on the evolution of Japanese popular media such as films, anime, and manga.  Other themes such as youth culture, fashion, and the spread of Japanese popular culture outside the country's borders are explored.  No background knowledge or Japanese language skills are required.

 

HIST 377/2 – A
History of Russia 1694 – 1917

This course provides an outline of Russian history from the reign of Peter the Great to the 1917 revolutions.  Long-term questions such changes in political liberty, economic development, the impact of warfare and foreign affairs, as well as gender relations are emphasized.

 

HIST 380/2 – A
History & Digital Media

This course offers an introduction to the changes that new media and technologies are bringing to historical research, writing, presentation, and teaching of the past.  The course begins with an overview of the history of the Internet and digital media, and then examines historical work on a variety of subjects — by scholars, teachers, archivists, museum curators, and popular historians — published on the Web.  Historical and critical readings provide the basis for the hands-on section of the course in which students develop pilot online history projects.

 

HIST 398/2 – A
Special Topics in History: American Capitalism

This course examines the history of capitalism and its relation to the making of the United States from the 15 th century to the present. We will trace the formation of “American capitalism” from its origins as a network of settler and extractive colonies in the Americas and its expansion as a continental and global empire. Different intertwining histories of enslavement, accumulation, dispossession, extraction, production, speculation, and consumption will be explored. We will pay particular attention to how and why “American capitalism” was produced and reproduced in and through material relation of power based on hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and religion. The readings will draw from multiple historiographies and fields, including the Black radical tradition, women of color and Third World feminisms, queer of color critique, and Indigenous decolonization.

 

HIST 402/2 – A
The Philosophy and Practice of History

This course examines problems in the philosophy and practice of history. Particular attention is given to contemporary debates about history as a distinctive mode of understanding and explanation. This course is required of all honours students.

 

HIST 485/2 - A
Public History Workshop: Podcasting: History and Practice

Description TBA.

 

HIST 498/2 – A
Advanced Topics in History: The Supernatural in History: Witches, Shamans, Vampires and Zombies

This course seeks to recapture the importance of certain spirit-beings – witches, shamans, vampires, and zombies – as a way of understanding social dynamics in the Atlantic world from the 17th through the 20th centuries. In particular, it will examine the connections between the political and the spiritual, looking at instances in which the intervention of spirits was a lens though which people understood interpersonal tensions. Rather than seeing the supernatural as something to be dismissed or explained away, we will try to understand historical actors’ beliefs on their own terms. Questioning the conventional distinctions between the rational and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, magic and science, the course challenges the historiographical convention of explaining the past in a strictly naturalistic manner.

 

HIST 498/2 – B
Advanced Topics in History: Global History: Oil, Empire, Catastrophe

In this seminar we treat one of the major problems of our time—climate change—through the lenses of oil, empire, and catastrophe. We will not tackle climate change directly but tangentially through a reconsideration of modern world history as the production of global interconnectedness, which in the end may not be as positive as the proponents of globalization have claimed. In this re-examination, we will sideline heroic deeds and actors, while centring the entangled histories of oil, empire, and catastrophe. This calculus defines our past and present; accordingly, ‘history' in this seminar is also under investigation for its disciplinary aiding and abetting of political forms, such as the modern state, that have become seemingly immutable when change is essential for the continued reproduction of life, human and other. In addition to acquiring historical knowledge of oil, empire, and catastrophe, students will take away from this seminar a critical appreciation of disciplinary forms of knowledge and their intimate relations to power. 

 

HIST 498/2 – C
Advanced Topics in History: Truth and Lies on the US-Mexican Border

Debates and distortions about the US-Mexican border are central to American political attention in our current moment. In the winter of 2024, nearly half of all adult Americans reportedly accepted the notion that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. We will examine the long history of the borderlands region and the interactions between the Indigenous people, Spaniards, Blacks, and Anglo-Americans who populated it across time. We will use both scholarly and eye-witness accounts of borderlands from Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s tale of his sixteenth-century journey from Florida through Texas and California to Luis Alberto Urrea’s reconstruction of the harrowing story of 26 Mexican men who paid to be smuggled across the dangerous Sonora-Arizona crossing known as The Devil’s Highway in 2001. This seminar focuses on the key issues of race, labour, identity, and community to unpack current misperceptions of the border, border policy, and border impermeability. 

 

HIST 498/2 – D
Advanced Topics in History: Decolonizing the Pacific

This seminar examines the historic and ongoing struggles over decolonization in the Pacific. Grounded in the thinking and writing of Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal peoples of Oceania, it explores the intimacies and entanglements across myriad archipelagic worlds stretching from Asia to the Americas. The readings will draw mainly from Indigenous, Black, and Third World feminist traditions to better reckon with the histories of colonization and racial capitalism, and at the same time, imagine different liberatory horizons. 

Winter 2025

HIST 200/4 – A
Introduction to History: A Late 20th Century Genocide: Srebrenica, July 1995

This course is an in-depth examination of a late twentieth-century genocide: the mass executions in July 1995 in and around the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica of more than eight-thousand Muslim men and boys by the Bosnian Serb Army and several paramilitary groups. What caused this violence? Who were the perpetrators? Why did they target certain groups and not others? And how should historians tell this history? As a first-year seminar, this course introduces students to the study of the past through this case. Topics to be addressed include: how to read primary and secondary sources; how to write analytical essays about such sources; how to tell history from macro and micro perspectives; and how to engage with, and explain, complex human behaviour by practicing empathy rather than judgement.

 

HIST 200/4 – B
Introduction to History: A global History of Sept. 11, 2001

On September 11, 2001, a group of nineteen hijackers used passenger aircraft to attack the World Trade Centre (New York City) and the Pentagon (Arlington, Virginia), killing 2996 people. Though two decades have since passed, the history of 9/11 is still being lived -- and still being written. This class explores what it means to live in what is often called the “post-9/11 era” through a range of themes and approaches, including: American Empire before and since; the War on Terror in global perspective; surveillance and policing; conspiracy theories and disinformation; post-9/11 cultural production; and questions of grief, public memory/commemoration, and selective forgetting. In addition to engagement with sources ranging from Iraqi memoirs to home-made documentaries to Supreme Court rulings, students will learn history by “making” it, including conducting oral history interviews with people who remember 9/11, as well as engagement with digital archives, databases, and other repositories of primary source material.

 

HIST 200/4 –  C
Introduction to History: Family & Kinship in Canada

HIST 202/4 – A
Modern Europe

This course introduces students to the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, as well as providing some grounding in historical method and the development of a critical historical mind.

 

HIST 205/4 – X
Canada: Post-Confederation

A survey of the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, from the fifth century to the 15th century, with consideration of political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious developments.

 

HIST 235/4 – A
The Holocaust

Beginning with a discussion of Jewish communities in Europe and America before 1933, this course traces the evolution of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and racism, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, the shaping of Nazi ideology, the growing demonization of the victims of the Holocaust and the genocide against them in their various countries, resistance by the victims, and the parts played by bystanders in the outcome of the Holocaust.

 

HIST 242/4 X
History of the Middle East

This course surveys the history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present.  It traces broadly the formation of an Islamic World over a millennium and follows its engagements with modernity, examining closely the shift from the overarching paradigm of the multi-ethnic/multilinguistic Ottoman Empire to that of the mono ethnic/monolinguistic modern nation state.  This course covers the political history of the region including the experience of British and French colonialism, the rise of nationalist movements, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and focuses on its social, intellectual, and cultural history.

 

HIST 253/ 4 – X
History of the US Since Civil War

This course is a survey of United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the present.  It asks how contests for power among different regions, classes, and groups animated U.S. political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual development.  Course topics include:  Reconstruction, reconciliation, and segregation; western expansion and empire; industrialization and immigration; urbanization, suburbanization, and consumption; reform and radical movements, including progressivism, the labour movement, civil rights, feminism, and the new left and right; world wars, Cold War, and globalization.

 

HIST 276/4 – A
History of Latin America: Colonial Period

A survey of Latin America from the pre-Columbian period up to the early nineteenth-century wars of independence. The class focuses on central Mexico and the Andes, the two centers of colonial power, but also touches on Brazil, the Caribbean, and Argentina. The class examines how indigenous civilizations, enslaved Africans, and European immigrants all shaped Latin America society and culture and focuses on Iberian techniques of colonial rule and subject populations’ responses to these.

 

HIST 285/4 – AA
Introduction to Law and Society

Law influences all aspects of life in society, from resolving conflicts to structuring family or commercial relationships to controlling crime to allocating property. This interdisciplinary course examines the roles law plays in Canada and internationally, from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Cross listed with POLI/ANTH/SOCI 285.

 

HIST 298/4 – A
Pacific Worlds

This course forefronts experiences and knowledges of Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal peoples of Oceania in better understanding the entangled and intimate worlds of the Pacific. Although fundamentally marked by imperialisms, capitalist extraction, and militarization, the contemporary Pacific is also a historical place profoundly shaped by centuries of imaginative worldmaking by peoples across multiple continents, archipelagos, and islands. This course simultaneously embraces a people’s historical perspective on social dilemmas currently faced by those in the Pacific, such as: environmental and climate crisis, intensified frictions over regional security, struggles over displacement and diaspora, and ongoing desires for decolonization. 

 

HIST 298/4 – BB
Histories of Film & Performance

This course examines intersections of film and performance. Course material includes screenings, scripts, recordings, live events, and scores that help us reflect with the transmission of the shared past, evidence, and its exclusions.

HIST 304/4 – BB
Tutorial: Prep. For Honours Essay

This course provides honours students in History with the opportunity for tutorial reading and research in preparation for the writing of the honours essay.

 

HIST 328/4 – A
The Scientific Revolution

This course explores the Scientific Revolution in the context of early modern European society and culture. Major themes include the debates over the methods, purposes, and scope of science; the relationship between science, the supernatural, and the occult; the relationship between science, technology, and craft; and scientific networks, institutions, and means of communication.

 

HIST 339/4 – A
Crime and Punishment in Canadian History

This course examines the history of crime and punishment in Canada. Topics include the definition and regulation of deviance; policing; trials and the criminal law; prisons and theories of punishment; the death penalty; crime and the media. Students engage with a variety of primary and secondary sources in readings and assignments.

 

HIST 342/4 – A
Crime & Punishment in Medieval Europe

This course will consider the ways Europeans conceptualized crime and punishment over the medieval millennium, from about 500 to 1500 CE. We will consider barbarian law codes, feud/compensation systems, the development of royal or public justice, and the ways the stark capital punishments most regimes introduced were tempered by forms of mercy.

 

HIST 354/ 4 – A
Revolutionary America

From the 1760s through 1815—a matter of a single generation—American society was transformed from a string of British colonial outposts into a powerful nation state. This course examines the origins, nature and consequences of the American drive toward independence, with a focus on the interplay between political ideology and social relations. Its premise is that this period was a turning point in both American and world history—marking the birth of the United States of America, the end of the First British Empire, and the beginnings of the Age of Revolution. Themes will include the transatlantic diffusion of liberal democratic ideas, social upheaval and class conflict, the simultaneous development of liberty and slavery, and the emergence of American nationalism to 1815.

 

HIST 360/4 – A
History and Sociology of Genocide from 1945

This course explores the history of a form of mass violence that many legal experts, human rights advocates, and scholars have understood as "genocide." After studying the history of the genesis of this term, we will examine primary sources that will give us a window into the worlds of ordinary people who have survived and perpetrated instances of mass killings. In the last third of the course we will explore why the international community has, more often than not, proven incapable of preventing and effectively halting gross violations of human rights. Cases to be examined will include Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and East Timor. This is a reading-intensive course, and our texts will include survivor memoirs, interviews with perpetrators, writings by human rights advocates, works of historical journalism, and scholarly studies.

 

HIST 368/4 – A
African Popular Culture

From African-American choirs touring South Africa in the early 1900s to Nigerian pulp fiction and the contemporary popularity of hip-hop and Hindi film in Africa, this course explores the varied terrain of African popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Beginning prior to European colonization of the continent, and moving through the hybrid cultural forms produced under imperial rule, to the politics of culture in postcolonial states, we will track the myriad ways in which African popular cultures have developed in relation to broader political and socio-economic shifts.  In highlighting the heterogeneous character of this popular cultural field — one which extends beyond the continent through diaspora and migration — particular emphasis will be placed on how African cultural forms have been shaped in conversation with influences from far afield.  Our 'texts' in this course will range broadly, including not only scholarly work, but also fiction, film, music and images that provide entry points into the ways African artists, youth, officials, freedom fighters, market women, bachelors, gangsters and others have engaged culturally with the world around them.

 

 

HIST 369/4 – A
Middle East: Empire/Gender/Sexuality in Modern Times

This course examines the historical formation and intersection of three distinct categories: empire, gender, and sexuality.  From the everyday practices of family life to the form of politics and the balance of geo-strategic relations, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a radical transformation of human organization within the Middle East and globally.  We will track these changes as they were experienced by people and folded into narratives and images in order to make them meaningful.  Topics may include imperialism, state formation, nationalism, Orientalism, feminism, and Islam.

 

HIST 372/4 – A
Latin America Via the Novel

This course uses three Latin American novels (The Mangy Parrot, Sab, and One Hundred Years of Solitude) in order to examine literary and historical means of representing particular episodes in Latin American history. We examine how novels treated key moments and topics in Mexican, Cuban, and Colombian history, including imperialism and autonomy; revolution and violence; and the operation of class, race, and gender hierarchies. Comparing factual and fictional accounts of these issues, we discuss how and why Gabriel García Márquez and other authors have depicted the region and its culture as they have, and we consider what their writing conveys about the uses people make of history and the role that historical memory plays in Latin American society.

 

HIST 373/4 – A
The Pacific War

This course explores the history of the Pacific War, from its origins in the expansion of the Japanese empire to the atomic bombings, Japan's surrender, and the shaping of postwar Asia.  While covering battles, strategy and tactics, and the weapons of war, the course also looks at diverse themes such as home fronts, propaganda, and how the war has been remembered and represented since 1945.

 

HIST 3750/4 – A
Global History: Indian Ocean World

A mystery attends the long transition from a multi-polar Indian Ocean World to a global Indian Ocean dominated by European empires and trading companies. As illustrated in an exhibit at the Ibn Battuta Mall in contemporary Dubai, comparing the vastly superior treasure ship of Zheng He to Vasco da Gama’s small sailing ship that reached India in 1498, Chinese vessels when they chose to dominated the waves in the 15th century. One day, one of those vessels launched a volley of bombs at a port on the Malabar Coast and vanished forever. It was into this power vacuum that the Portuguese sailed, around the Cape of Good Hope to the fabled medieval trading emporium of Calicut, and set in motion a struggle for dominance that transformed not only the Indian Ocean transregional arena—but, the world as a whole. This course traces the history of global transformation from the crucial vantage point of economic competition in the Indian Ocean World. It will also examine the cultural, legal, and political ramifications of that struggle for resources, with a particular focus on Islam, which had for centuries provided the legal framework for commercial and other transactions in the Western Indian Ocean.

 

HIST 385/4 – AA
Age of Dictators: Europe 1914-45

This lecture course examines in some detail the pivotal years of the last century, which began with the death of idealism in the trenches of the western front in the First World War, and ended with the defeat of Nazism in 1945.  Of central concern are the challenges posed to the occidental way of thinking by the rise of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and their various imitators throughout the rest of Europe.  The focus of the course will be very much on Western Europe, although some attention will be paid to developments elsewhere.

 

HIST 397/4 – A
History and Sound

This course examines sound as a historical subject and a medium for understanding the past. Emphasizing aural rather than visual sources, it addresses a variety of topics including the history of aural art forms such as music and radio; sound recording and transmission technologies; commercial uses of sound; architectural acoustics; and the evolution of soundscapes. The course may include training in the production of radio documentaries, urban sound walks, and audio podcasts.

 

HIST 398/4 - AA
Special Topics in History: Film and Memory of Vichy

This course examines the tumultuous years of the Second World War in France through the lens of French film.  France has had enormous difficulty dealing with the reality of its wartime occupation by the Nazis, and the collaboration of some French people with the Nazi regime and its French surrogate, the Vichy regime.  We will be looking at themes such as everyday life under the Occupation, resistance, collaboration, the political nature of the Vichy regime, and the question of France’s role in the Final Solution.  How these themes have been dealt with in French film since 1945 is the central preoccupation of the course.

 

HIST 398/4 - B
Special Topics in History: History of China/US Relations

This course examines the history of China-U.S. relations from the late eighteenth century to the present. It focuses on the development of their relationship in the private sector beyond state-to-state diplomacy, with emphasis on the transpacific circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Each session covers varying forms of agents of encounter, ranging from merchants, missionaries, laborers, and students to plants, food, art, and technology. Students will explore how the movement of these agents has informed the two giants’ (un)changing views of each other and how their evolving relations have been intertwined at the most mundane level with such themes as imperialism, racism, capitalism, and globalization. Students will be introduced to a range of primary sources including museum collections, novels, films, and archival documents.  

 

HIST 398/4 – C
Special Topics in History: History of the Climate Crisis

This course will allow students to delve into the complex environmental, social, political, and scientific history of our ongoing, global crisis of human-made climate change. We’ll begin by situating the crisis in the longer history of Earth’s climate from the Pleistocene to the Little Ice Age, but the emphasis of the course will be on how abiding material changes across the world resulting from human activities in modern times—since roughly 1500 (expansion of agrarian land uses, unbridled resource extraction, colonialism, global trade, uncontainable consumer and industrial waste, increasing reliance on fossil fuels, and much more)—have had disparate direct and indirect social, political, economic, and cultural consequences for different communities around the world.

HIST 403/4 – A
Methodology in History

This course will provide an introduction to historical methods—conducting research into and presentation of findings about historical subjects. Topics will include: critical and effective reading of historical sources; exploration of non-written sources as historical evidence; use of quantitative methods in history; concrete problems of interpretation encountered during historical research; and the presentation of findings through different forms of writing. Because this is required Honours course, it will have no particular geographical or chronological focus. In the course of the term, students will write and present to the other students an extended essay based on primary-source research.

 

HIST 437/4 – A
Advanced Studies in European History: Popular Revolt and Popular Protest Europe 1300 – 1600

This joint graduate-undergraduate seminar will examine the phenomenon of popular revolts in Europe from the early fourteenth century until the end of the sixteenth.  Over those centuries, governing authorities faced numerous uprisings from peasants, artisans, and labourers.  Over the course of the term we will look at revolts in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, France, and England, examining the complex contexts of religious change, political consolidation, economic and demographic crisis, and social transformation.

 

HIST 481/4 – AA
Advanced Studies in Public History: War & Memory in the 20th C

This seminar explores historiographical and broader academic engagement with memory - individual, collective, and national. We will approach memories of 20th century wars by looking at a wide range of modes of representation of the past across media including novels, films, video games and genres from World War I poetry to science fiction.  Like all seminars, it has a major presentation, discussion, and class participation component. Students can write a major research paper on memories and representation of nearly any theme intersecting with war and mass violence from the late 19th century to present.

 

HIST 498/4 – A
Advanced Topics in History: Transnational Networks

In recent years the network has emerged as a critical touchstone of scholarly focus, both empirically and theoretically. Using the concept as a lens, this course explores a wide range of cases including: Atlantic worlds emerging in relation to the slave trade; Muslim commercial networks in the Indian Ocean; the circulations through which European empires rose and fell; and more recent examples of migration, transnational political movements, and neoliberal economics. In order to aid us in exploring these historical examples as well as critically assess the possibilities and limitations of the network as a conceptual tool, the course also features a selection of key theoretical texts from cultural theory, political economy and the roots and fruits of recent turns to a Latourian toolkit.

 

HIST 498/4 – AA
Advanced Topics in History: Art & The city: History of Performance

This seminar examines performance histories in Tiohti:áke/Montréal. The course approaches “performing arts” broadly and encourages shaping toolkits for studying cultural, historical, creative, and political practices.

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