World History to 1500 C.E.M
A broad survey of global history emphasizing cultural transactions before 1500
- 100-level (view skill-set goals for 100- and 200-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: Surveys of world history prior to 1500 often center on Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean to the exclusion of the Americas, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to William McNeill’s World History textbook, I use excerpts from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Larry Gonnick’s A Cartoon History of the World and Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony. These excerpts drawn from outside the textbook perform several important duties: they highlight the transactional border focus I prefer for world history surveys, they situate world history in a more global perspective, and they emphasize unique historiographical problems in secondary-source material and textbooks with which survey-level students can easily engage.
Medieval Mediterranean Survey
A broad survey of the medieval Mediterranean from 250-1492 C.E.
- 100-level (view skill-set goals for 100- and 200-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: The narrative of European exceptionalism that begins with the Roman period can often be countered by expanding the Medieval world to demonstrate the cross-Mediterranean interaction between North Africa, Arabia, Persia, Kievan Rus, and Europe. I expand the normative French/German/English narrative of medieval history to focus on the cultural interplay between medieval Mediterranean urban centers (Byzantium, Kiev, Ctestiphon, Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordoba in addition to Rome, Paris and London) in order to demonstrate the importance of cultural interplay in political, economic and social developments in the Mediterranen between 250 and 1492 C.E. I supplement Barbara Rosenwein’s A Short History of the Middle Ages with primary source material translated from Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, Arabic, old French, German, Italian and Old English in order to emphasize the problem of translations in historical reading as well as to decenter traditional European narratives.
Greece and Rome in Antiquity
A broad survey of the ancient Mediterranean
- 100-level (view skill-set goals for 100- and 200-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: From Athenian democracy to Spartan military tradition to Roman senatorial power, the history of ancient Greece and Rome conjure images of long-dead golden-age civilization right along side concepts that we hear and engage with every day in the modern world. This course will begin with the history and culture of ancient Greece and the Hellenizing influence Greek culture and philosophy had throughout the Mediterranean. We will then examine the rise of Rome from small Etruscan town to its height as the centralizing power of the Mediterranean world. We will pay particular attention to modern interpretations of Greek and Roman culture, government, and society as a way of separating our historical understanding of the ancient world from concepts drawn from the ancient world but adapted for modern use.
Early Medieval Europe and Later Medieval Europe
Two semester-long surveys on Medieval Europe, 250-1050 and 1050-1492
- 200-level (view skill-set goals for 100- and 200-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: These two topical courses are structured around a series of questions in order to explore the medieval European world in more depth. Questions like “Did Rome fall?”, “Was feudalism actually feudal?”, “Did the Irish save civilization?”, “How many Crusades were there, really?”, and “How bleak was the Black Death?” introduce doubt and room for debate in the standard historical narrative of medieval Europe. Jo Ann Moran and Richard Gerberding’s Medieval Worlds textbook is supplemented by a series of legal codes, manuscripts, and archaeological artifacts to extend students’ experience of the Middle Ages into material culture and social history.
Black Death
A global cultural history of responses to bubonic plague, 500 C.E. to 1900 C.E.
- 200-level (view skill-set goals for 100- and 200-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: It’s rare that historicans can compare and contrast cultural responses to similar medical phenomenon over a period of 1500 years. The bacteria that caused the Black Death (yersinia pestis) appears in the late Antique Roman Empire, again in the late-medieval and early-modern Mediterranean, in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in Hawaii in the twentieth century, allowing for the study of cultural reactions to a single bacteria in a variety of familiar and very unfamiliar environments. Of particular interest are the cross-cultural and inter-cultural transactions that occur when bubonic plague arises in urban environments composed of several different cultural communities. This class also carefully examines the development of medical responses like quarantine and germ theory, which both support and come into conflict with cultural values, in order to challenge the notion of scientific fact as an unchanging constant unaffected by social norms. Students encounter a variety of primary sources including personal responses to the 1348 incursion of bubonic plague, early-modern images of the Dans Macabre, huge-beaked plague masks that demonstrate the prevalence of miasma contagion theory, and a historical analysis of the plague in early twentieth-century Hawaii (Plague and Fire, James Mohr).
Saints’ Lives in Medieval History
A study of medieval norms which governed the writing of and learning of history through the lens of hagiography, which is often
- 300-level (view skill-set goals for 300-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: The principles of historiography we learn as historians also appear in a variety of unfamiliar contexts. Students will gain additional expertise in the historical narrative of the Middle Ages as it is constructed by modern historians in addition to engaging with medieval variants of historiographical thinking. The guiding text is a collection of articles that cover historiography, hagiography, biography, serial biography and the question of genre itself in medieval history (Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Deliyannis). This text is supplemented with a series of primary sources in translation that demonstrate various authors’ adherence to and divergence from the conventions and features discussed in the main text (Procopius’ Secret Histories, Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, etc.).
Supernaturally Violent: Divine Intervention and Conflict Resolution in the Middle Ages
A focused study of medieval conflict and the role divine agents play in solving conflict
- 300-level (view skill-set goals for 300-level courses)
- Historiographical motivation: Medieval texts are full of supernatural conclusions to serious conflicts. For instance, one of the major theological conflicts of the early Middle Ages ended when Arius of Alexandria was struck dead by God, shamed with a divine case of dysentery for perpetuating a heretical view of the nature of Christ. To modern historians, these situations seem almost comical, but the medieval world view conceived of divine agency as an active force in the world. Students will engage with some post-colonial theory as a way of importing historical methods from other periods and geographies into the historiographical questions of medieval Europe. Texts include Robert Bartlett’s The Hanged Man, a case study of a resurrection miracle analyzed from three different viewpoints: the witnesses to the hanging and resurrection, priests who investigated the miracle story’s verity when the saint who saved the hanged man was due to be canonized, and modern historians who seek to balance our rational world view with the very different outlines of the medieval world view.
Digital History
A hands-on course culmninating in the production of an online historical project
- For advanced majors (view skill-set goals for advanced courses)
- Historiographical motivation: The consumption of history is not simply an academic endeavor. Lay audiences devour documentaries, Web sites and Wikipedia articles in search of a better understanding of history, and part of a historian’s job is to produce thoughtful, professional historical arguments in those media. In addition to refining traditional historical writing skills, students will directly engage with the tools necessary to utilize large historical datasets and guide lay and professional historians through those datasets. These tools include the image and manuscript datasets themselves; metadata to describe and catalog historical documents and artifacts quickly; databases and visualization tools to mine and present large-scale text; and HTML and web-page creation tools to guide audiences through the narrative of an argument based on the metadata and datasets available to historians.
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