The Global Cold War
This course examines the Cold War as the “global Cold War” it truly was. Students will pay particular attention to how the long superpower struggle between the United States and Soviet Union (1945–1989) intersected with decolonization and the rise of the “Third World.” Spreading from Europe to the colonial world, the global Cold War shaped and was shaped by U.S., Soviet, European, and Third World peoples in ways still influencing our lives today. Given the immense geography at play here, students will not strive to master any particular place, but rather trace how specific themes connect and vary across time and space. Themes include: U.S.-Soviet rivalry and Third World decolonization; diplomacy and decision-making; environmentalism, energy, and nuclear arms; society and everyday life; race, gender, culture; and economics and global development.
American Capitalism
This course examines the United States as a capitalist economy and society from its colonial origins to neoliberal globalization. Themes include: capitalism’s emergence from British mercantilism and Western imperialism; the “market” revolution of nineteenth-century America; slavery and the Civil War in U.S. economic development; the rise of national and multinational industry; capitalist and working class formation; state regulation, deregulation and broader state-business relations; post-World War II prosperity, deindustrialization, and the rise of the “FIRE” economy; war, politics, immigration, and culture; the triumphs and challenges of “free market” neoliberalism and globalization; and the role of ideas in the making of U.S. and global capitalism.
Freedom, Power, Protest in Modern America
Since the Civil War, Americans from all walks of life have challenged their nation’s institutions, culture, and fellow citizens in the name of freedom—shaping the United States on its path to modern nationhood. As they did so, they approached freedom the way this class approaches freedom—not as timeless truth, but a value whose meaning and scope are always contested. This course considers how individuals, groups, and movements across the national spectrum confronted and changed the concepts, relations, and structures of freedom and power affecting their lives and communities. Topics include civil rights, foreign policy, economics, reproductive health, environmentalism, progressive and conservative activism, housing and gentrification, hip-hop and rock ‘n’ roll.
U.S.-Asia Relations
The United States and Asia have encountered one another throughout their histories. This course examines these encounters and relationships—spanning trade and culture, migration and social contacts, sports and medicine, diplomacy and war—from the age of empire to today’s age of globalization. Examining U.S.-Asia relations at local, national, and global scales, students grapple with diverse actors behind U.S.-Asia relations: governments, citizens, businesses, cultural producers, businesses, and other individuals and organizations spanning various communities and regions. Focusing on the U.S. and East Asia, while addressing the wider frames of the Americas and Asia, this class interrogates the various meanings making up “America” and “Asia.” Neither was a dominant player; this course equally emphasizes the role of Americans and Asians. Through perceptions, interests, cultures, social relationships, economics, and ideas, Americans and Asians contested, befriended, and both distantly and closely interacted with one another across the Pacific Rim.
U.S. Foreign Policy
What is U.S. foreign policy? How does one practice it? This course exposes students to the nature and practice of U.S. foreign policy by considering its key theoretical approaches, case studies, and practical exercises. Examining U.S. foreign policy as a process involving key actors—the White House, U.S. Congress, the national security establishment, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and public opinion—students learn how to understand and participate in U.S. foreign policy. Course materials include academic essays, policy memos, current events, lectures, and in-class simulations of foreign policy meetings and discussions.
United States Since 1865
This course examines the history of the United States since 1865. It has a dual purpose: first, to familiarize students with the major issues of U.S. history; second, to raise students’ analytical skills in history and related fields. Through lectures and discussions, students gain an understanding of post-Civil War America illuminating America’s cultural, political, economic, and social dimensions as a diverse, rich, complex society—and how to evaluate and engage the arguments, methods, and ideas historians use to understand the world around us. Topics include Reconstruction and the New South; Progressivism and World War I; the Great Depression and New Deal; World War II and the Cold War; postwar American economy and society; race, gender, class, and sexuality in the Sixties “rights revolution”; the rise of conservatism; and globalization and inequality in contemporary U.S. politics and society.
Nations, Revolutions, Empires:
19th-Century America in Local & Global Perspectives
This graduate course examines 19th-century America as a terrain of diverse nations, revolutions, and empires. Disrupting the traditional narrative depicting 19th-century America as rising, in linear and triumphalist fashion, from a provincial republic to a mature industrial empire, this course emphasizes how various local and global national, revolutionary, and imperial processes impacted Americans—and non-Americans—across the nineteenth century. Themes include war and empire, race and gender, politics and the state, labor and the economy, nature and the environment, and global and transnational history. Approaching the nineteenth-century United States as a nation among nations—indeed, a nation itself composed of competing national visions and constituencies—this course aims, most broadly, at interrogating how historians and scholars think about nation, revolution, and empire.