The Department of History

The Department of History offers a wide variety of classes in a broad array of regions and time periods. For a complete listing of all the courses the Department offers, see the Online Catalogue.

Below is an unofficial and partial list of topics courses taught in History in SPRING 2013. It is strictly for the use of expanded course descriptions. For the complete official course offerings, both graduate and undergraduate, please consult the UIC SCHEDULE OF CLASSES.

100 LEVEL

History 100 - Western Civilization to 1864
CRN: 32900
MW 9:00-9:50 with additional discussion sections
John Abbott

History 101 - Western Civilization since 1864
CRN: 15347
MW 11:00-11:50 with additional discussion sections
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska

CRN: 15357
MW 9:00-9:50 with additional discussion sections
Jim Sack

CRN: 15358
MW 1:00-1:50 with additional discussion sections
Nicole Jordan

History 103 - Early America: From Colonization to Civil War and Reconstruction
CRN: 15371
MW 9:00-9:50 with additional discussion sections
Michael Goode

CRN: 31115
MW 1:00-1:50 with additional discussion sections
Corey Capers

History 104 - Modern America: From Industrialization to Globalization
CRN: 15389
MW 2:00-2:50 with additional discussion sections
Catherine Jacquet

CRN: 15390
MW 10:00-10:50 with additional discussion sections
Anne Parsons

History 105 - Global Transformations and the Rise of the West Since 1000
CRN: 34011
Fully online

Jonathan Daly

Encounters and exchanges among world cultures have been the main driving force behind the extraordinary intellectual, scientific, and technological transformations of recent centuries. This course introduces students to the history of these exchanges and transformations during the past one thousand years. The course is fully online—students follow a defined schedule but have no classes to attend.

History 106 - The World since 1400
CRN: 27594
MW 1:00-1:50 with additional discussion sections

Mark Liechty

History 114 - Topics in World History
CRN: 29126/29128
TR 11:00-12:15 
Dean Kostantaras

200 LEVEL

History 205 - Roman Art and Archaeology
CRS: 15445/15446
TR 8:00-9:15
Jennifer Tobin

Steve Fanning

History 206 is a survey of the history Europe from about 250 to about 1000, covering the Later Roman Empire, the period of the “Fall of Rome” and the “Barbarian Invasions,” the establishment of the so-called successor states (Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Anglo-Saxons, Franks), the rise of the Carolingians and the career of Charlemagne and the creation of his empire, and the division of the Carolingian Empire into a number of independent states (the “creation of Europe”).  Other topics that will be discussed will be the rise of the Christian Church, the origins of the Byzantine Empire and the period of the Viking raids on Europe.

History 214 - Twentieth-Century Europe: From World War I to European Integration, 1914-2000
CRN: 32928 
MWF 1:00-1:50 
John Abbott

History 216 - War Since Napoleon CRN: 32227 MWF 10:00-10:50 am

Robert Messer

From Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" to war as art in modern mass media images the class will explore cultural, psychological, technological, political and personal aspects of war as "a force that gives us meaning". The readings, lectures and discussions will support an individual research project treating a topic developed in consultation between the student and the instructors.

History 217 - Introduction to United States Military History CRN: 26778  W 6:00-9:00 pm

Lawrence Stack

HIST 222 - England to 1689
CRN: 31120
MWF 11:00-11:50
Jim Sack

HIST 234 - History of Poland
CRN: 30599
TR 11:00-12:15
Keely Stauter-Halsted

HIST 242 - Modern Africa
CRN: 27595
MW 1:00-1:50 with additional discussion sections
Kirk Hoppe

HIST 248 - African American HIstory since 1877
CRN: 21462
TR 11:00-12:15
Joseph Lipari

HIST 252 - Sexuality in America: Historical Perspectives
CRN: 31870
TR 11:00-12:15
John D'Emilio

HIST 253 - The Worker in American Life
CRN: 34105
MW 9:00-9:50 with additional discussion sections
Christopher Cantwell 

HST 254 - Topics in Urban HIstory
CRN: 34106
MWF 11:00-11:50
Michael Goode

Urban seaports were an important part of the "revolutionary" Atlantic. As centers for commerce, shipping, and culture, they knit Atlantic empires together and became the primary venue through which the Atlantic slave trade was channeled. Seaport locales were also potentially radical, as they provided opportunities for disparate groups of people to organize and assert their political and economic rights. This course will examine Atlantic seaports from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries in three separate zones: West Africa (Calabar, in present-day Nigeria); mainland British America (Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Charlestown, and Newport, Rhode Island); and Western Europe (London). Themes will include slavery, labor, abolition, wealth, poverty, gender relations, and political, social, and religious radicalism. We will consider how each of these elements made urban seaports "revolutionary" in the early modern Atlantic.

HIST 258 - Topics in Intellectual History
CRN: 32932
TR 11:00-12:15
Sunil Agnani

An introduction to the intellectual debates of the Enlightenment (broadly understood as the period from 1700-1800) including an examination of emerging notions of race in the period. As part of this, we explore the idea of progress (the progress of mankind, of language, of society, of the arts—for all of these were thought to follow a pattern) and also its critique. We also explore the idea of empire—territorial empire, maritime empire, etc.—as it emerges in some of these texts. In authors like Equiano and in the Haitian revolution, the question of race overlaps with that of empire through the "triangular trade" (the transatlantic structure of slavery). We open with broad debates on the idea of Enlightenment as a process by considering fundamental essays by Kant and Moses Mendelssohn on this question. We then turn to two texts by Voltaire—one of the most significant writers and thinkers from this period (indeed, he becomes the very figure of the philosophe and intellectual). Candide gives us a sense of how Enlightenment thinkers viewed the New World, whereas his Letters on England reveal the mixture of admiration and envy expressed by pre-revolutionary French writers when looking at England. It also foregrounds the Franco-British rivalry which plays out in the imperial context— culminating in nineteenth-century projects of imperialism.
In order to get a sense of the moral and philosophical writing of the Enlightenment, we read the Scottish philosopher David Hume and his brief (if dense) text, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Through this work we examine the debate taking place on the importance of reason and the passions in the period (which guides human nature?). We return to the idea of progress in the political sphere by reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a landmark text making the case for female equality. Alongside Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine also agitated for greater freedom in the period, and we read his famous work, Common Sense. The course closes by considering the German writer Gottfried Herder, who foreshadowed the rise of nationalism in a new form (in terms of the spirit of a people, or even an ethnos), and is conventionally taken to be closer to Romanticism rather than the Enlightenment.

HIST 259 - History of American Women
CRN: 32933/33091
TR 9:30-10:45
Catherine Jacquet

History 262 - Latin America Since 1850 CRN: 34119 and 34120  MW 10:00-10:50 with additional discussion sections 

Joaquín M. Chávez

This is an introductory course to the modern history of Latin America. It engages thematically focused discussions on nation, race and ethnicity; peasant politics; slave emancipation; empire and dictatorship; gender, labor and populism; revolution; and the Cold war in a variety of regional contexts and periods. In particular we will discuss topics pertaining the histories of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. We will read landmark texts as well as recent publications that illustrate the evolution of this field.

HIST 263 African American Intellectual History
CRN: 30188
MWF 9:00-9:50
Ainsworth Clarke

History 281 - Topics in Social History: Transgender History, Identity, and Politics CRN: 28833 TR 12:30-1:45 pm

Catherine Jacquet

This course, which is crosslisted with GWS 294, explores the experiences of and responses to trans*, gender non-conforming, and intersex (TGI) people from the colonial era to the present day United States. We will study the rich, varied, and expansive history of TGI experience from Native American Two-Spirit to the drag balls of the mid-20^th century to intersex organizing of the 1990s.

We will examine how scientific/medical authorities, legal authorities, and everyday people have understood and responded to various kinds of gender non-conformity. Course texts include social histories, medical and legal perspectives, popular culture, and the work of contemporary trans activists. Our readings will also emphasize how TGI people themselves have understood their own experience and been agents of their own lives. Questions we will consider throughout the semester: How have understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality changed over time in the U.S.? How have dominant institutions (science/medicine, the media, law) constructed, regulated, and reinforced particular sex/gender norms? What are the experiences of those who transgress dominant gender norms/expectations?  How does this reflect dominant social beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality?

HIST 288 - History of Modern Puerto Rico
CRN: 15460
MWF 2:00-2:50
Jose Lopez

HIST 290 - Mexican-American History CRN: 33344 TR 12:30-1:45

A Chavez

HIST 292 - History and Theories of Feminism
CRN: 24686
TR 12:30-1:45
Jennifer Rupert

HIST 294 - Topics in Catholic History:The Church and State in American Politics
CRN: 30207 TR 9:30-10:45 Kyle Wagner

The complex and dynamic relationships between formal religious institutions, personal religious beliefs and practices, and the state are central to the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present.  Over the course of this history, Catholics have played a significant role in defining, interpreting, and challenging notions of the proper relationship between religion and the state.  This class will explore the myriad ways in which Catholic laity and Catholic clergy have contributed to this process. 

We will begin in colonial America, focusing on the establishment and development of Maryland as well as the anti-Catholic sentiment present throughout many of the other colonies.  From there we will cover the First Amendment to the United States Constitution with its two religion clauses.  Because this amendment has provided the primary backdrop to the relationship between religion and the state since the founding of this nation, much of the remainder of the course will focus on how Catholics have contributed to the definition and application of the principles outlined in these two clauses.  To this end, we will explore 19th century nativism, the establishment of Catholic parochial schools, slavery and the Civil War, the presidential elections of 1928 and 1960, the Civil Rights Movement, contraception and abortion, the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, and several other topics.  

Each week we will be reading both primary and secondary sources.  The general format for each class session will be a lecture to provide context and major themes, followed by a discussion period in which we analyze the primary and secondary sources we have read for that class session.  This format may change slightly depending on various factors, including your interests. 

300 LEVEL

History 300 is the History Methods Colloquium, required of all majors, where students learn the methods and tools of the discipline. Toward that end, all History 300 courses, while differing in topic, region, and theme, include at least one scheduled session in the library where students receive instruction in on-line search techniques, at least two short essays, which will be critiqued and returned to students before submission of subsequent assignments, and one longer research paper, which requires a rough draft.  It is expected that these skills will be utilized when students write their major's paper in a 400-level course.

CRN: 15412 M 3:00-5:50
Susan Levine

History 300 - History Methods Colloquium

CRN: 15413 M 3:00-5:50

History 300 - History Methods Colloquium
CRN: 15414
MWF 11:00-11:50

John Abbott

John Lapham

400 LEVEL

History 401 - Topics in Greek History CRN: 34169/34171 TR 3:30-4:45
Dean Kostantaras

History 410 - Topics in Modern European History
CRN: 27723/27724
W 4:00-6:50
Jonathan Daly

History 418 - Topics in German History
CRN: 15419/19280
TR 9:30-10:45
Richard Levy

History 420 - Teaching in the Social Sciences
CRN: 19470/19471
R 3:30-6:20
Julie Peters 

History 421 - Topics in British and Irish History
CRN: 32236/32237
W 3:00-5:50
Mark Horowitz

Power, politics and policy in the reigns of the first Tudor king, his son and grandson (Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI) will be explored in the context of the development of the modern English state and its relevance to the present.  Topics will include a 15th century overview (including the more romantic than accurate Wars of the Roses); religion; communication; local vs. 'national'; finance and trade; foreign affairs; government, law and society; and culture, among others. The course format, style and tone are geared towards learning with a hands-on approach to communicating and applying what is learned.  It's also rather fun.

History 461 - Topics in Latin American History CRN: 32965/32966
TR 9:30-10:45
Chris Boyer

History 475 - Educational Practice Seminar
CRN: 15422/15423
W 4:00-6:50
Julie Peters

Hist 481 - Topics in Social History: The Camera on Chicago's Neighborhood Streets, 1880-1930

CRN: 22467/22892
W 3:00-5:50
Burt Bledstein

Between 1880-1930 the west side of Chicago attracted a roving population of immigrant and emigrants to the nation’s central metropolis. The neighborhood was a portal for eighteen ethnic and racial groups with thirty languages heard on the polyglot streets. Everything and everyone were in motion: children everywhere, peddlers and market vendors, working girls and laboring families, saloons and sporting houses, medical clinics and urban sociologists, and Hull-House, the best-known reform settlement in America. As a reporter on the streets observed, “people cursed or raved or snarled, but were never heavy or old or asleep.”  Witness to everyday existence was the camera-eye of the new Kodak and Graflex detective street camera now making visible formerly hidden commonplaces: chiseled ridges on a tired worker’s face, creases in a cheap suit, the stare of a damaged child, visiting nurses in a tenement.  Witness to actual events, the photos give an understanding to the diversity and complexity of people’s lives in America‘s most prominent inner city–in their beauty and ugliness.

History 490 - Topics in Diplomatic History CRN: 32969/32970 M 3:00-5:50
Nicole Jordan

History 492 - Topics in Intellectual History: Enlightenment, Empire, and Conquest: Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Denis Diderot

CRN: 32971/32972
TR 2:00-3:15
Sunil Agnani

This course explores key historical and philosophical themes of the Enlightenment through three significant authors and one broad topic: the philosophe Denis Diderot, the British political thinker and parliamentarian Edmund Burke, and the historian Edward Gibbon. As we will see, none of these labels does justice to the range of writings they produced, moving from literary genres to philosophical treatises. In addition to these, we will also give consideration to the Haitian Revolution (which occurs with the French Revolution) through a selection of primary documents and texts from figures such as Toussaint Louverture.

We begin with Diderot, whose work on the Encyclopédie is quintessentially associated with the term "enlightenment." We also examine his writings on empire and conquest in contributions to Raynal’sHistory of the Two Indies. We then focus on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, alongside excerpts from important contemporary studies of him (JGA Pocock). Part of our consideration will be what relation this history of the (Roman) empire has to the age of expansion in which Gibbon wrote it (the rise of British and French empires). But we are also interested in his theory of the rise of modern Europe, and his views on paganism, polytheism, and “barbarians.” In an intentional contrast to his history of a monumental empire, we shift to the example of the Haitian Revolution to consider the emancipatory claims made by insurgents in the richest sugar colony of the world forming part of French imperial system. We examine the broader significance of this revolution as an attempt to articulate the idea of a "citizenship beyond race"--one which was not recognized or willfully misrecognized for centuries. We conclude by considering Edmund Burke's rich writings on Ireland, America, India and France.

Ralph Keen

Medieval Catholic culture dealt with the Jewish presence in its midst in various ways. In this course we will look at religious and social tensions between Judaism and Christianity from late antiquity to the Renaissance.

History 495 - Topics in Religious History
CRN: 34753/34181
TR 12:30-1:45
Claire Sufrin

As a nation of immigrants committed by the Bill of Rights to freedom of religion, the United States of America has offered Jews both a unique setting in which to live and work and a unique setting in which to understand their God and observe the customs of their religion. In this course, we will examine the evolution of American Judaism from the colonial period to the present day. We will trace shifts in the situation of Jews in America and corresponding changes in Jewish practice and theology. Emphasis will be placed on critical understanding both of religious writings and of cultural materials such as short stories and films.

500 LEVEL

HIST 503 - Colloquium on World History

CRN: 24609
M 5:00-7:50 pm
Kirk Arden Hoppe

History 503 is a graduate reading colloquium that introduces students to the field of the New World History.  We explore overlapping issues of theory and method while building a framework of content. World History is not the history of everything everywhere, but represents a number of contested approaches to history emphasizing global links and interactions, and historic ideas, processes or experiences important to or impacting societies globally.  The new world history argues against the histories of civilizations and societies in isolation and argues that no societies are historically isolated from broader historically processes. This course focuses on method and theory with the assumption that students accumulate content through their own particular interests, teaching and broader research. This course is directed both to students interested in World History as a highly marketable teaching field, and to students interested in World History as a new field that is greatly influencing current research directions throughout the discipline.

History 503 is divided into broad thematic units.  Examples of weekly units include:
Metageography and the construction of the other over time and space
Religious syncretism
Environmental circulations and Eco-Cultural bundles
The production of race and class in the Atlantic world
Frontiers and hybridity
Industrialization and modern empire
Decolonization and the nation-state
MNCs, NGOs and GMOs.

HIST 551b - Colloquium on American History

CRN: 24683
W 5:00-7:50 pm
Robert Johnston

This course is one of many possible introductions to the massive and amazing historical literature on the United States after 1877.  The purposes of the course are many: to offer some sense of coverage of the modern American past, as well as a realization that complete coverage is impossible; to provide a communal forum for discussing some of the boldest and most imaginative works of scholarship around; to familiarize you with older classic books as well as recent pathbreaking departures; and to aid you in the thought processes that will eventually allow you to produce, as well as teach, this kind of scholarship.  The department intends for this course to be a major step toward preparing for your master’s or Ph.D. examinations. Ultimately, however, it is even more important to prepare you for a lifetime of world-class scholarly literacy, and it is especially with that elusive goal in mind that I have prepared the course.

HIST 593 - The Racialized Body

CRN: 30123
M 2:00-4:50 pm
Cynthia Blair
In this course we will examine the ways that historical notions of race, racial ideology and racial politics are manifested in how “the body” has been represented, inhabited, and regulated.  Readings will address a broad range of intersecting issues such as race and labor; health and disability; national and neighborhood borders; policing and prisons; sexuality and the racialized politics of desire; and the racialized body in visual culture and popular media. This course will focus on the United States, incorporating both the ways that national and neighborhood boundaries are often read onto the body, as well as how transgressions of those boundaries have had bodily repercussions. Equally important, we will explore the ways that racialized communities have responded to efforts to define, construct, and control their bodies through everyday practices and collective forms of resistance.

HIST 593 - Rethinking the Postwar “Urban Crisis”

CRN: 30124
T 3:30-6:15 pm
Elizabeth Todd-Breland

In this course we will examine multiple perspectives on the origins, development, and defining characteristics of life in postwar U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. In putting forth a historical perspective on the “urban crisis,” historians have examined postwar tensions around issues of race, class, gender, tax law, deindustrialization, homeownership, suburbanization, urban renewal, urban decline, and formal and informal politics in cities in different geographic regions of the United States. In these narratives, the emergence of the period of postwar “urban crisis” is often linked to the drastic demographic shifts brought on by the continued migration of African Americans to urban centers during World War II, the loss of manufacturing and other low-skill jobs in urban centers in the following decades, continued structural inequality, and riots—or urban rebellions—in major U.S. cities.This course intentionally includes a number of newer texts that challenge us to re-think what characterized the postwar “urban crisis” historically with regard to time frame, region, metropolitan space, organizational focus, and notions of politics.

HIST 594 - Colonialism, Empire, and Cultural Encounters in the Americas

CRN: 30125
R 3:30-6:20 pm
Joaquin Chavez

This course examines interactions among Europeans, Indigenous societies, and peoples of African descent in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America during the colonial period as well as exchanges between U.S. and Latin American nationals in the twentieth century. We will read landmark texts that epitomize the theoretical and methodological evolution of these fields. During the first part of the course, we will explore first encounters between Europeans and indigenous societies in the Americas, the ways in which social and racial hierarchies, religious and political ideologies and systems, and technologies introduced by the British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese empires shaped processes of identity formation and cultural exchanges among colonial subjects in a variety of regional contexts. We will also study the ways in which the former colonial subjects reinvented national identities at the time of the revolutions of Independence that swept the Continent between 1776 and 1826. In the second part of the course, we will ponder interactions between U.S. nationals and Latin Americans in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War (1898) and during the Cold War. In particular we will examine the impact of U.S. race ideologies in Cuba and Haiti during the U.S. occupations of those countries and cultural dimensions of the Cold War in Latin America.

HIST 594 - Ideas, Class, and Economy in World History

CRN: 31131
T 5:00-7:50 pm
First meeting Lincoln Hall 201; subsequently 720 S Dearborn St, Unit 206
Deirdre McCloskey

Our task is to survey the exploding field of world history in its macro aspect—that is, histories that claim to synthesize everything (as against monographs on this or that aspect of everything).  We’re going to put into discussion the ever-rising number of historical and sociological books (and a few articles) that claim to account for the patterns of world history, and especially the Great Divergence after 1800.  From Montesquieu, Smith, and Marx down to David Harvey and Joel Mokyr the history of everything has usually amounted to explaining the Rise of the West, what Ken Pomeranz called the Great Divergence and I call anyway the Great Fact.  And yet a vigorous counter-narrative has emerged that does not place Europe at the center of it all.  Both Eurocentric and Europetal ruminations have recently proliferated to a startling degree, after William McNeill and Philip Curtin and Jack Goody and a few other pioneers in the 1970s first made big world history serious.   Your leader, for example, has recently joined the fray, and we will be scrutinizing her three “ideational” books on the matter (2006, 2010, and a third forthcoming in manuscript) in some detail in the first few weeks by way of a unifying place to start our discussions.  From it you will learn the strengths and weaknesses of an economic approach, and especially the central question: How much do ideas and ideology matter, and how?  But the bulk of our work will be on alternatives—Marxist, for example (Wallerstein, Harvey); or cultural (Goody, Landes, and others); geographic (Diamond); Polanyan (Polanyi himself; Finley, Scott); neo-institutional (North, Greif, Robinson).