College of Arts & Sciences

SPRING 2013 UPPER-DIVISION COURSES

New courses

HIS 340  Stalinism: Terror and Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1920's-7950's: Dr. Chakars

This course examines the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin from 1928 to 1953. This period was repressive, but also transformative. The course will address not only the suffering inflicted by Stalin's steep repression, but also the social, cultural, and economic impact of his policies. Course readings will focus on the experiences of ordinary people to demonstrate that Stalin’s rule brought both opportunity, as well as great tragedy. Stalinism, historians argue, was more than a political ideology such as Marxism and Leninism, but a way of life and civilization distinct from anything the modern world had yet experienced.

HIS 344 The Environmental History of Africa: Dr. Hooper

This course will focus on the relationship between African societies and their environments from the pre-colonial period to the present-day. We will examine diverse African strategies for surviving in frequently harsh surroundings. We will also analyze the impact of colonial policies and “Western” science on these strategies. Finally, we will use this historical background to study the problems that currently face African communities, including desertification, conflicts over land use, and arguments about conservation.

This course will examine popular and educated belief in the supernatural during the early modern period in Europe, beginning with late medieval concepts of magic and finishing with the end of witchcraft trials during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will focus especially on the “witch-craze” that occurred across Europe and its American colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will first investigate the cultural aspects of witchcraft belief, analyzing how both certain men and women came to be viewed as witches. We will then study witchcraft as a legal crime by analyzing the judicial machinery of witchcraft prosecutions, as well as the influence that witch trials exerted on the process of legal reform in the seventeenth century. Readings will include trial records, journals, demonology tracts, as well as secondary sources treating witchcraft as a crucial component of early modern beliefs about law, religion, and culture.

HIS 349 Pages of Irish History: the Place of a Small Country: Fr. Wrynn

This will be a survey of historical Ireland from the introduction of the European history to the island by traders and monastic missionaries in the fifth century to the generation of Ireland’s joining of the European Community (Union). It will not pretend to be a continuous narrative, but will highlight moments in terms of four weeks concentrated to each “Page”. 1. Ireland’s mission to the continent in the early middle ages. 2. Ireland as target of Viking and Norman expansionism 3. Her second exodus to the Old World and the New 4. The healing of Ireland’s wounds.

New course description

HIS 356 Modern South Asia: Dr. Abbas

The Kennedys and The Beatles, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the Space Race. Free Speech, Counterculturalism, Nixon and Wallace, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Stonewall and Alcatraz. These were revolutionary times, and not only in America, with uprisings in Prague, student protests in Paris, Warsaw, and Mexico City, and the end of colonialism in Africa. This seminar will look closely at this decade that rocked the worlds of so many, and students will acquaint themselves with the literature, art, archives, and artifacts of this era, scholarly and otherwise, in weekly discussions. They will also research and write a seminar paper exploring some aspect of the year’s events and culture.