HISTORY

NEW Courses & Spotlight Courses

 

*NEW COURSES THIS SPRING!

institutions in the formation of ideas about race in East Asia. Our topics will range from the European Society of Jesus in the 16th and 17th centuries to American and German missionaries in the 19th century East Asia to colonized Korea’s experience with Japanese Shinto, Japanese Protestantism, and American Protestantism to China’s Muslim minority. The course will use excerpts from historical textbooks, diaries, newspapers, journals/ magazines, and scholarly articles and books to examine the racial contours and the intellectual and cultural repercussions of these cross-cultural encounters.  

HSTY 399/499: Advanced Reading in Black History: ENSLAVED FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES AND CULTURE IN EARLY AMERICA, M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
The history of racial slavery in the United States is one filled with injustice and violence but also with the triumph and perseverance of the human spirit.  From the earliest arrivals of captive Africans on the North American shores to emancipation in 1865, enslaved people experienced the full range of human emotions. They fell in love, raised families, negotiated conflicts with one another, built lasting communities, and passed down cultural knowledge about West African spirituality, folklore, food and music from generation to generation even as they endured the hardships and horrors of bondage. This course delves into the complexities of the “peculiar institution” from the perspective of enslaved people. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it draws on a wide range of primary and secondary materials that illuminate these experiences and critically engages issues such as gender, age, labor, location, and health that daily impacted the lives of enslaved people.  Equally important, this course also assesses how the history of racial slavery—and especially the history of enslaved families—continues to echo in America’s racial politics even today. For more information please contact Dr. Jenifer Barclay at jlb227@case.edu.  

HSTY 399/499: Advanced Reading in Black History: 
FROM KING TO OBAMA: BLACK THOUGHT, T 2:45-5:15PM 
Beginning with Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Movement in the late 1960s and ending with the election of President Barack Obama, the first African American president in the nation’s history, this course will focus on the intellectual issues that have animated African American life between 1968 and 2008.  Against the larger backdrop of the increased popularity of evangelical Christianity in the public sphere, retrenchment of civil rights gains, deindustrialization in urban areas, contraction of the welfare state, and the general conservatism of the Cold War era, we will explore how black intellectuals conceptualized the latter stages of the civil rights and black power movements emphasizing civil and human rights, the internationalization of black struggle, the rise of black conservatism and its implications on public policy, the shifting politics of black identity occasioned by the intensification of the AIDS crisis, the explosion of the crack cocaine epidemic, and the increased popularity of black cultural nationalism as expressed in the Second Black Renaissance.  For more information contact Dr. Stephen Hall at sgh30@case.edu  

*OTHER EXCITING COURSE OFFERINGS THIS SPRING!

HSTY 339: THE ORIGINS OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, 1900-1948, T 4:30-7:00PM
Discover the roots of mutual hatred.  The British Empire took control of Palestine after driving the Germans and Turks from the region near the end of World War I.  From that moment on, the British had an increasingly difficult time administering the region.  Jewish colonists had already been settling in the land for decades, and with their takeover, the British gave them and other Zionists reason to believe that the Empire would facilitate Jewish efforts.  At the same time, the indigenous Arabs of Palestine appealed to the British to protect their very birthright, to keep their country from passing into someone else's hands.  The British gave Arabs, too, reason to believe that they would recognize and defend their claims.  In the few decades that the British Mandate governed Palestine it oversaw riots, revolution, and terrorist bombings.  When it withdrew from Palestine, its legacy was a brutal war between Arabs and Jews; and the legacy of that war holds an iron grip on the course of world history to this day.  Had the British Empire not been in Palestine, and not made the fateful decisions that it did, there would be no Israel and no Arab-Israeli conflict as we know them.  Course materials include histories of Zionism, pre-Zionist Palestine, the British Mandate years, the British Empire in other Arab lands, and the 1948 war and aftermath.  Primary sources from the perspective British officials on the ground in Palestine receive much attention.  The histories of engineering and agriculture are highlighted alongside traditional social and political perspectives.  Global and Cultural Diversity GER; SAGES Departmental Seminar.  For more information contact Dr. John Broich at john.broich@case.edu.

HSTY 361/461: CRIME AND POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY AMERICA, T 2:45-5:15PM
This is a seminar exploring crime, punishment, and popular culture in colonial North America and the early United States through 1860.  We'll examines a series of popular crime genres, including execution sermons, criminal autobiographies, trial reports, and based-on-fact novels—all early forerunners to modern crime coverage on television and in newspapers, movies, and popular music.  The last several weeks of the semester will be devoted to independent student research projects.  Types of cases covered in the shared readings include (among others): Witchcraft, Infanticide, Piracy, Robbery & Burglary, Familicide, and Sexual Homicide.   Course Requirements: Several short (4-page) papers, research presentation & paper.  For more information please contact Dr. Dan Cohen at dac37@case.edu.  

HSTY 373/473:  Advanced Topics in American Women’s History: 
AMERICAN WOMEN AND MEDICINE, T/TH 1:15-2:30PM
This advanced seminar is designed to allow students to investigate aspects of American women's history that are not deeply explored in other courses.  The two central purposes of the course are to move students forward in their study of American women's history and to provide advanced study for graduate students and other students interested in women-focused topics.  The topic is subject to change, but may be any of the following or something similar: women and medicine, images of women in popular culture, growing up female, women and political movements, women and war, etc. Recommended preparation:  HSTY 353/453 or HSTY 354/454. Also offered as WGST 373.  For more information please contact Dr. Renee Sentilles at rms30@case.edu.