Looking ahead to course registration? Among our regular courses on the Spring 2014 schedule, we’ve also listed a number of courses below which are new or updated for the coming season.
Many courses also offer credit toward minor fields — including Asian Studies, Digital Studies, and Museum Studies– as well as the Honors program, and more. See descriptions for details.
New & Revised courses – Spring 2014
AMST 202 – Sophomore American Studies Seminar: The Politics and Culture of the 1960s – Prof. Rigelhaupt
[This course can count in the History major if you haven’t already taken AMST 202/303.]
Few decades in American life carry as much meaning as the 1960s. Simply hearing the phrase “the sixties” conjures up meaning, ideas, or images to most Americans. The 1960s have a mythic quality in our political and cultural life. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, feminism, student movements, hippies and counterculture, rock and roll, Motown, Camelot, The Great Society, and assassinations were all key components of the 1960s and had a tremendous impact on American life. This course will engage questions that will allow us to critically examine how the 1960s became a decade of profound social, cultural, and political change. Why were people struggling for social and cultural change in American society during the 1960s? How did social movements affect American politics? What is the relationship between cultural and political change during the 1960s? How did American culture and media represent and reflect movements for social and political change in the 1960s? What has been the lasting impact of backlash and resistance to social and cultural change in the 1960s? How and why did the 1960s foster both liberal and conservative ideas and movements? Lastly, why do ideas and debates about “the sixties” continue to resonate and remain important in America?
AMST 303—Junior American Studies Seminar: The Civil War in Popular Culture – Prof. Kutz
[This course can count in the History major if you haven’t already taken AMST 202/303.]
Since 1865, popular depictions of the Civil War’s course, causes and consequences have radically changed as Americans have adjusted their notions of racial justice, gender roles, and class relations. This course will explore how popular culture has both reflected and shaped how Americans have viewed the Civil War and its legacy. Topics will include slave narratives; wartime photography, illustration, and music; soldier’s memoirs; films such as Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Glory; novels and short stories set during the war; historical commemoration and statuary; and reenactment.
HIST 190 – Biographical Approaches to History and Culture – Prof. Crawley
[Note that while this course counts General Education and as an Honors class, as HIST 190 it does not currently count as a History major elective.]
Topics this year include:
John Wilkes Booth, Jim Henson, Martin Luther King, Jr. (by David Garrow, Pulitzer Prize winner), Bob Dylan, The Hatfields and McCoys, Jim Thorpe, Mata Hari, Augustus, Henry Ward Beecher (by Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winner), Women of the Manhattan Project, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan, Henry VIII, Shakespeare, Spartacus, Machiavelli, Simon Bolivar, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh
HIST 300AA Chinese History through Film – Prof. Fernsebner
[This course also counts towards the Asian Studies minor]
This course explores the intersection of Chinese history and cinema, with a focus on mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Exploring major films from the Maoist period (1949-1978) through the present day, key themes will include: revolutionary aesthetics and realities, presentations of gender, nation, and violence, as well as issues related to late twentieth and twenty-first century globalization. This course will also help students build intermediate to advanced level skills in analysis, oral, and written communication, as well as skills in video editing and analysis. Particular course objectives include the development of a historical understanding of global processes, the ability to analyze sources and arguments, and the ability to read critically primary sources and modern authorities.”
For a preview, see last year’s course page at: http://chinesefilm2013.umwblogs.org/
For more information, contact Dr. Susan Fernsebner at sfernseb [at] umw.edu
HIST 300CC — Food in Global History – Prof. Corlu
Yes, food has a history. It is not an exaggeration to say that the history of food is the history of civilization. Thousands of years of food culture lurks behind our quotidian decisions to make choices about food, whether it is a stop at the “Chinese” buffet or the “Italian” family restaurant. What we eat, how it has been produced and consumed simultaneously determine and reflect basic dynamics of global civilization. From the agricultural revolution to the sophisticated food culture(s) of the last few centuries, from the grain fields of Egypt to the vineyards of Tuscany and the industrial canned products of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of food has been shaped in decisions that reflect environmental change, cultural interaction, class formation, imperial expansion, and even the Pandora’s Box of genetic modification. Food in Global History is a course that takes an adventurous journey into the rewarding realm of thoroughly understanding what we eat.
HIST300EE — The Byzantine Empire to 1453 – Prof. Corlu
This is a course focusing on the Byzantine Empire, from its painful birth starting with the division of the Roman Empire to its final demise in 1453, when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. In this course, we will trace the scientific, artistic, political, military, and cultural achievements of this long-lived empire, and follow its evolution from antiquity to a medieval society, ultimately sowing the seeds of a good number of developments that come during the Italian renaissance. The legacy of the Byzantines is still very much with us in the forms of law, the arts, our understanding of politics and religion to name a few, populating a formidable list. An understanding of the Byzantines forms the background of any learning on the Balkans and the Middle East today, as well as that nebulous entity called the Western Civilization
HIST300FF – English Civil War – Prof. Burns
This class studies the turmoil in the British Isles from the late 1630s to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The conflict known as the English Civil War (although Scotland and Ireland were essential to it) led to the dramatic public execution of Charles I, and shaped the history of Britain for centuries. In addition to the political and military conflict, we will study the ideologies such as Puritanism that drove conflict, and consider the influence of the struggle on the European continent and England’s American colonies as well as on the British Isles themselves. The effect of the revolution on such major intellectual figures as John Milton, Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish will also be examined.
HIST 428 – Adventures in Digital History – Prof. McClurken
[Counts in History, Museum Studies, and Digital Studies.]
This seminar will focus on the process of creating digital history. The course readings, workshops, and discussions will be aimed at exposing students to the philosophy and practice of the emerging field of History and New Media. The course will be centered on the creation of four digital history projects, all of which are related to making local resources available online. These projects are likely to include: the creation of a digital project on historical markers in Fredericksburg; the building of a digital project pairing current and historical photographs of the school and the Fredericksburg community; the creation of an exhibit on UMW’s extensive collection of student scrapbooks; OR the scanning of items from the James Monroe Museum in 3D, and creating a digital exhibit as well as physical copies of those items.
Why take this class? You’ll build technological proficiencies and creative skills that will help you in other courses and in the post-college world. You’ll participate in creative workshops constructing the newest form of history, honing your research and writing ability as you present materials in new forms, new technologies, and new venues. You’ll also have a chance to work with faculty and staff from multiple academic departments, the Library, the James Monroe Museum, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies.
No digital creation skills are necessary, just an open mind, a willingness to learn, and a desire to analyze, create, and present historical content in new and creative ways.
Any questions? Contact me at jmcclurk@umw.edu or @jmcclurken on Twitter or check out the previous iterations of this class at http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org/, http://dh2010.umwblogs.org and http://dh2012.umwblogs.org
HIST471E5 – American Sports History – Prof. Ferrell
In this writing- and speaking-intensive seminar, students will study the wide range of American sports from the colonial period to the present. Arranged in three major sections, the course begins with a general introduction to sports history, covering both its historiography and efforts to explain its legitimacy. Part one continues with readings and discussions on wide-ranging topics—such as nineteenth-century interest in curling, nativism and baseball, racial segregation and bowling, women’s hockey in the 1920s, golf heroes, sports stadiums, British influences, and the Olympics and the Cold War. The remaining two parts of the course center on students’ topics (chosen from a list provided by the instructor). A major presentation and research paper (shared with the class) provide the base for additional discussions, with each student planning and leading class discussion. Requirements include a blog designed to demonstrate a feel for and understanding of the importance of sports in American history. (Jack Bales plans to join the class and thus will likely contribute insightful comments related to his study of baseball history.)
HIST471E6 – Second World Urbanity – Prof. Harris
This seminar explores the history of cities and urban life in communist countries of the 20th century. We will examine well-known capital cities such as Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, as well as regional cities such as Skopje and Novosibirsk. These cities and their countries were situated between the first world of capitalist liberal democracies and the third world of de-colonized developing countries. In this seminar, we will examine how the cities of this so-called “second world” emerged in the second half of the 20th century as an alternative path to urbanization and how they contributed to the globalization of the present day. We will study how communist countries designed and built their cities according to their common Marxist-Leninist ideological values such as egalitarianism, a scientific and technologically modern way of life, and socialist property. The seminar likewise examines the different national and international aesthetic traditions that informed the design of socialist cities and their architecture such as Stalinist neo-classicism and 20th century modernism. We will also study how the inhabitants of such cities participated in their development and experienced everyday life from shopping and communal apartments to monumental subway systems and war memorials
HIST 471E7 – History of the American Wilderness — Prof. Sellers
This course will historicize American conceptions of “wilderness,” and explore the ways in which—as environmental historian Michael Lewis writes—“wilderness is simultaneously a real thing and a human construction.” It will consider various Americans’ competing definitions of wilderness, how their attitudes about it have changed over time, and how those contrasting definitions and developing attitudes shaped interactions among people, and between humans and the natural world. We will follow an arc from colonial encounters, to 19th-century romantics, to 20th-century activists and the repercussions of the 1964 Wilderness Act, and finally the place of wilderness in contemporary American culture, in the process considering how historians of different generations have utilized and critiqued the concept itself.
