This course explores catastrophes in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, using these uncommon occurrences as a window into American culture and its practices. Following a roughly chronological path, the course is organized around different kinds of catastrophes Americans have faced--ranging from floods and forest fires to epidemics, from state-sanctioned violence to domestic terrorism, from warfare to violent crime--and the historical themes and issues these moments of crisis revealed, and shaped.

This course investigates American involvement in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. The course focuses on the years of the Second Indochina War (1954-1975), with particular attention to the meaning and experience of American involvement for Americans. At the same time, the course places these core subjects in the context of a larger history, including the history of Southeast Asia before and after US involvement there and the legacies of the war for the United States and its citizens.

This course explores the political and cultural frontiers between Indian peoples and Euro-Americans from contact to the present. Students use documents, autobiography, ethnohistory, ethnography, film, and literature to examine Indian-white relations from a variety of viewpoints. The approach moves beyond a simple narrative of what happened to Indians to a more complex consideration of how Indians have made their own history and how that history has been presented and contested.

This course explores the United States in the transformative period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War One. Investigations will be focused on three important domestic issues of the period--the reconstruction of the nation and of the concept of race in the aftermath of the Civil War; the development of an industrialized economy and the attendant changes in Americans' lives; and the politics of reform that emerged repeatedly during these years as Americans fought over the nature of citizenship, freedom, and justice in a rapidly changing nation.

This course emphasizes the following themes: the things that divided Americans from one another and the things that united them in rebellion; the incidents and ideology that convinced colonists that the British king, parliament, and people were conspiring to deprive them of their liberty; the reasons that some Americans remained loyalists while others became rebels; the relationship between imperial constitutional crisis and domestic social crisis; the consequences of the Revolution for women, African Americans, and Native Americans; the implications of the daring experiment in establishing

This course examines the history of the activities of intelligence services, with a focus on Europe and North America from the end of WWI to the present day. In today's world, few figures fascinate us (or disgust us) as much as the spy, a figure whose profession poses difficult questions about truth and deception, morality and deviance, personal and national betrayal, and the power of the modern state.

This course examines dictatorial regimes that had an enormous destructive impact on Europe and the world in the twentieth century: Stalin's USSR, Hitler's Germany, and Mussolini's Italy.

This course examines the political development of the fifteen states that emerged from the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991. It focuses on different Soviet Republics in the last decades of Soviet rule and then charts how they emerged from the communist system and created new political institutions and ideologies to bolster their independence. In order to grasp the cultural, national and religious diversity of the Soviet empire and the post-Soviet space, the course examines European areas, the Caucasus region, and Central Asia.

This course examines the experience of the Cold War in Europe when Europe was divided between opposing Soviet and American spheres of influence. Students examine the origins of a polarized Europe and the crises on both sides of the Iron Curtain that threatened to unravel it. While the course has a transnational approach, the main focus is on the experiences of Germany, France, and East-Central Europe (Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary). Seminar discussions of primary and secondary texts allow students to evaluate recent interpretations of the Cold War in Europe.

This course examines the works and times of prominent intellectual critics of modern European society. It centers on the texts of nineteenth-century writers, theorists, scientists and revolutionaries who formulated far-reaching analyses of and challenges to modern cultures, practices, values and economies. Special emphasis is placed on the generation of ideas and ideologies of the period, such as materialism, psychoanalysis and Marxism, and their application in culture and the arts. Cross-listed as HIST/HUM 317.