The courses and times listed below are subject to change. Please refer to the schedule of classes in GoSOLAR for the most current information.
Multiple sections offered on various days/times. Consult the schedule in GoSOLAR for a detailed schedule.
History 3000: Introduction to Historical Studies (multiple sections listed below)
• CRN 84209, TR 10:00 – 11:45, Denise Davidson
This course introduces students to the practice of history. We explore the ways in which historians do their work, what kinds of questions they ask, and what methods they use to frame and answer those questions. We discuss the nature of historical knowledge, practice how to analyze and present historical information, and evaluate different theories that ground history.
• CRN 80516, MW 1:00 – 2:45, Alex Cummings
This course uses the stories of bandits, rebels, and renegades to introduce students to the basics of historical research methods and historiography. Participants will learn how to analyze primary sources such as newspaper articles, photographs, videos, diaries, trial transcripts and material culture by exploring the lives of pirates, heretics, and other individuals who resisted laws and social norms throughout history. These stories will provide a window into the categories of analysis (such as race, space, gender, sexuality, and class) that historians use to understand human experience in the past.
• CRN 82915, TR 1:00 – 2:45, Marni Davis
This course introduces students to the methods historians use to research, understand, and write about the past. The class will be thematically organized around the history of the "Jazz Age" -- the United States in the 1920s -- with particular attention paid to issues such as race, gender, business, morality, religion, and immigration. We will also engage the history of downtown Atlanta during the 1920s by analyzing primary sources such as maps, census records, photographs, and newspapers, as well as the urban landscape itself.
• CRN 81691, TR 2:50 – 4:35, Michele Reid-Vazquez
This seminar course introduces students to the practice of history. We will examine how historians do their work, what kinds of questions they ask, and what methods they use to frame research and answer those questions, particularly regarding issues of power, race, gender, and labor relations. Additional course themes include slavery, empire, and immigration. We will discuss the nature of historical knowledge, practice the analysis and presentation of historical information, and evaluate different theories that ground history.
History 3200: North America Before 1800, CRN 87354, MW 1:00-2:45, Charles Steffen
History 3210: 19th Century US History, CRN 83680, TR 10:00 – 11:45, David Sehat
This class will examine the major issues of the 19th century, such as urbanization, slavery, industrialization, westward expansion, the Civil War, and U.S. imperialism. We will read a combination of primary and secondary sources and will work together on perfecting your academic writing ability.
History 3220: 20th Century US History, CRN 82914, TR 8:00-9:45, Scott Matthews
In this course, we will examine the tumult, tragedy, and triumph in the lives of a wide array of Americans from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to September 11th, 2001. Instead of conceiving of the 20th century in simple chronological terms (1900-2000), we will characterize it as a broader period of profound transitions and revolutions that transformed America into a modern nation. Consequently, our focus will be the “long” 20th century that begins in the aftermath of the Civil War and slavery and ends with new technological and cultural revolutions characteristic of a “postmodern” age in the 1990s and early 2000s. During the late 19th and 20th century, America changed from a society that was largely rural and agrarian to one predominantly urban and industrial. Rapid expansion in the West led to the “closing” of the frontier and the near extermination of Native American culture. Massive immigration resulted in ethnic diversity and tension, while rapid urbanization and industrialization produced poverty, political corruption, and corporate monopolies. During this time, America also suffered through crippling economic depressions and fought in far flung wars that established - and challenged - its status as a world power. At the same time, American citizens fought for civil rights in a series of social revolutions focused on issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that forced the nation to live up to its democratic ideals. On the cultural front, musicians and artists created groundbreaking and influential forms of uniquely American artistic expression such as jazz, the blues, country music, rock n’ roll, hip-hop, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism. Throughout the semester, we will study these social, economic, political, and cultural transformations by reading the words, listening to the voices, and looking at the faces of the famous, infamous, and anonymous Americans who made the United States the country it is today.
History 3500: The Ancient Mediterranean, CRN 84210, MW 1:00-2:45, Lela Urquhart
This class examines the history and culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, from 5000 BCE all the way up to 500 CE, through the evidence of archaeology, ancient literature and drama, inscriptions, and biographies. The major societies that are examined are those of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Greece, Carthage, and Rome. In each of these areas, we consider topics such as the role of kingship, monuments and power, warfare, the differences between elites and non-elites, the creation of empires, and religion.
History 3520: Early Modern Europe, 1500-1789, CRN 87358, TR 10:00 – 11:45, Nick Wilding
How, why and when did Europe become modern, if ever? How did beliefs, ways of knowing and ways of living change, or remain unchanged? We will study Europe’s varied social, intellectual, political, cultural and economic histories, along with its role in a rapidly changing world.
History 3530: Europe Since 1789, CRN 87360, TR 2:50 – 4:35, Greg Moore
This class explores the political, social, and cultural history of Europe from the French Revolution to the present day. Major topics will include industrialization; nationalism and the nation state; imperialism; fascism and communism; and postwar European integration. We shall pay particular attention to the construction and reshaping of identities during this period and explore how the meaning of “Europe” itself has changed over time.
History 3600/AAS 3600: The Caribbean World, CRN 87359, TR 1:00-2:45, Michele Reid-Vazquez
This undergraduate course introduces students to conceptual, comparative, and integrative issues of the Caribbean by exploring the colonial period, the eras of revolution and abolition in the nineteenth century, and nationalist movements in the 20th century. Students will examine how the comparative legacies of colonialism, slavery, abolition, indentured labor, and independence influenced the regions’ contemporary culture and society. Special emphasis will be placed on issues related to politics, race and gender relations, cultural and intellectual production of national identity, and immigration, particularly in Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica.
History 3625: War in Europe and America Since 1500, CRN 88084, TR 8:00-9:45, Robin Conner
This course will explore Western military history from 1500 to the present, with a particular focus on American military history. We will study a variety of conflicts including the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and “small wars”/ counterinsurgencies. Topics will include developments in military strategy and technology; the “face” of battle; ethics, leadership, and morality in war; the relationship between the military and civil society; and war in culture and memory. Students will read and view a variety of primary and secondary materials. Previous semesters have included a visit to an Atlanta-area battlefield. Note: This course satisfies the ROTC military history commissioning requirement.
History 3630: The United States & The World, CRN 87370, TR 1:00 – 2:45, Christine Skwiot
This course situates the U.S. in world history and the world in U.S. history. Topics include the Columbian exchange, revolution and nation-building, slavery, frontier expansion, emancipation, immigration, industrialization, overseas imperialism, Great Depression, world wars, the Cold War, and Civil Rights. These are standard fare of U.S. history courses. They also describe global processes of which the U.S. was a part, and we will utilize comparative, cross-cultural, transnational, and world historical frameworks to analyze them as such. While this course offers an overview of the U.S. in world history, it also delves deeply into select topics: the Natives, Mexicans, and Anglos who made the borderlands that became the U.S. Southwest, the ways Haiti and Haitians and Hawaiians and the Hawaiian Islands shaped race, nationhood, and culture on the mainland, the Japanese immigrants in California who lived between the U.S. and Japanese nations and empires, and the nationalist and internationalist struggles of African American expatriates in Ghana against racism and colonialism. We will thus focus on how the “world” shaped four of the most iconic and quintessentially “American” moments and movements—the frontier, Civil War, the “Americanization” of immigrants, and Civil Rights—as well as the other way around.
History 3640: Piracy from Ancient to Modern, CRN 87364, MW 5:30 – 7:15, David McCreery
This course will examine piracy and privateering, as well as adjunct subjects such as shipbuilding and navigation, from Ancient Egypt to present-day Somalia and the Straits of Mallaca. This will involve readings in secondary and primary sources and the evaluation of pirate films.
History 3680: Modern Jewish History, CRN 87355, MW 1:00-2:45, Marni Davis
HIST 3680 will examine Jewish social, political, cultural, economic, and intellectual history from the 1500s until the present. Using a wide range of primary sources (including memoirs, political manifestos and propaganda, feature films, music, and graphic novels), we will explore the sweeping transformations to Jews' status and identity from Europe and the Mediterranean region to the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. Topics will include: the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation; Jews' role in the development of modern ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, socialism, and capitalism; the challenges to Jewish identity and community posed by both integration and anti-Semitism; and the consequences of the demographic shifts that have characterized the Jewish diaspora throughout the modern period.
History 3700: China and Japan to 1600, CRN 87357, MW 1:00-2:45, Douglas Reynolds
This course surveys the origins and development up to 1600 of the two major cultural and population centers of East Asia: China and Japan. It gives special attention to key ideas, institutions, cultural achievements, and persons, not just as facts to remember but to elucidate the larger features and patterns of Chinese and Japanese history. Our textbook is the excellent study of Conrad Schirokauer, et al., A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations (either 3rd or 4th eds - 2006 or 2013), supplemented by other readings and brief class reports by students.
History 3720: Colonial Latin America, CRN 86080, MW 1:00-2:45, J.T. Way
This class introduces students to the cultural, social, and economic history of one of the world’s great empires. Beginning with pre-Columbian civilizations and passing through the New World Encounter, the golden age of Spain’s empire, the Bourbon period and the age of independence, it provides essential knowledge for understanding modern Latin America and the modern world in general. Focusing on subaltern populations and “history from below,” it provides an introduction not only to Latin American history, but to the study of history as well.
History 3780: The Middle East, 600 to 1800, CRN 87374, TR 10:00-11:45, Allen Fromherz
The fourteenth century historian Ibn Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddimah (a word that means “introduction” in Arabic), his three-volume philosophy of history, that “the inner meaning” of history involves more than the mere description or recording of events. Following Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy, the purpose of this course is not only to provide you with a chronological understanding of early Islamic history and its development. Rather, the course will also constantly challenge students to work with classmates to ask original questions about Middle Eastern history, to engage with primary source literature in translation, to ask “the how and the why” of events. This course will also challenge you to understand “the causes and origins of existing things,” to put the frenzied modern, media focus on the history Middle East in an informed, historical context. Even as we study the rise of Islam in seventh century Arabia, we will begin to understand some of the root reasons for the complexity of modern Middle Eastern and North African societies.
History 3790: The Middle East Since 1800, CRN 88521, MW 1:00-2:45,
History 4215: Space & Place in American History, CRN 87372, TR 2:50-4:35,Jeffrey Trask
This course will examine U.S. intellectual and cultural history through an exploration of ideas about the American landscape. We will study developments in art, architecture, literature, philosophy and religion through readings of primary and secondary historical texts and examination of contemporary images of the American landscape as they have related to, and helped to shape, ideas about race, class and gender in American society. From the development of industrial cities and the westward expansion of the frontier in the nineteenth century to the rise of suburbs and the transformation of post-industrial urban economies in the twentieth century, this course will examine the ways Americans have created meanings about their surroundings, while they have adapted the environment to their needs.
History 4245: United States in the 1960s, CRN 87369 / (Honors Section CRN 88069), TR 2:50 – 4:35, John McMillian
This course examines what historians sometimes refer to as "the long 60s" (roughly 1955-1975). We'll explore the Beat Generation, the Cold War, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the New Left, the Vietnam War, liberalism, conservativism, the Great Society, the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968, feminism, gay liberation, environmentalism, music, the media, and the broad legacy of the Sixties. Course materials include primary sources, memoirs, historical monographs, and dramatic and documentary films.
History 4260: African-American Women, CRN 82237, TR 10:00-11:45, Jacqueline Rouse
History 4310: Georgia, CRN 81692, M 1:00 – 4:25, Mary Rolinson
This course will explore important themes in Georgia History from Native American societies prior to European settlement to the present including: physical geography, settlement patterns, and natural resources; economic and political development; and the influence of race, class, gender, and culture on social dynamics. Much of the material will be presented in lectures, but reading and discussion of assigned texts is a critical component of the student’s engagement with the subject. We will investigate particular themes in detail through critical analysis of supplementary handouts, web resources, documentaries, and film clips
History 4325: Public History & Historic Preservation, CRN 82963, T 9:00 – 12:25, Richard Laub
This course is designed to provide the student with an understanding of the theory and practice of Public History and Historic Preservation. The course will cover a variety of topics including museum studies, material culture, the application of National Register criteria, historic interpretation, oral history, local history and preservation at the local, state and federal levels. The class will include several field trips to areas sites, local museums and historic neighborhoods.
History 4330: Oral History, CRN 85009, T 5:30 – 8:55 pm, Cliff Kuhn
The course develops an appreciation of the field of oral history, its evolution, methodological concerns, and applications. Students will learn about all facets of the oral history process, including interview preparation and research, equipment, interview technique, the nature and character of evidence, transcribing and editing, and legal and ethical concerns. A major component of the course will be a project based on student field work on some aspect of the theme, “The South in Transition.”
History 4400: History of the American West, CRN 86083, MW 10:00 – 11:45, H. Rob Baker
The West has always had mythic power in the American imagination. To seventeenth-century Puritans it stood for savagery and sin—a wild expanse of tangled woodland and untamed Indians. To eighteenth-century frontiersmen like Daniel Boone it was a vast hunting ground and, eventually, a place for fortune-hunting. By the nineteenth century, Americans no longer imagined the West as a place of danger and foreboding, but of honey and milk. Heroes like David Crockett fired the imagination and the newspaper editor Horace Greeley advised an entire generation in the 1840s to “Go West.” Following the bloody ravages of the Civil War, many did. In the “Great West” Americans found their own knights errant in the wandering cowboys and the gunslingers who battled landholding grandees and sprawling railroad corporations in the name of small homesteaders looking to stake out their own small part of the American dream. And in men like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok they found lawmen willing to defend the rights of property and the public peace from the rough characters who populated cowtowns and mining camps. Of course, myth is one thing but reality another. This course explores both the historical forces that fashioned the American West and the ways in which the West has always infected the popular imagination. Hollywood did not invent the genre of the “western”: it had a long history that extended back at least as far as “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West Show, which toured America and Europe in the late-nineteenth century, and was an inspiration to Bram Stoker as he penned his gothic masterpiece Dracula. This course will examine the connections between historical myth and reality.
History 4460: Bill of Rights, CRN 87363 / (Honors Section CRN 88070), MW 2:50-4:35, H. Rob Baker
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But in the scope of history, these natural rights have been anything but self-evident. The Founders lived in a society that supported slavery, legal distinctions based on race, and subjected women to a patriarchal regime that denied them the right to their property, their wages, and access to the courts. But this did not mean that the Declaration of
Independence was the offspring of hypocrisy. It was instead a promise of possibilities, and it empowered generations to seek legal protection of their rights. The Declaration’s broad promises were enshrined in multiple bills of rights adopted by the states and by the people of the United States in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. This course explores the multitude of rights struggles in American history, beginning with abolitionists and women who challenged repressive laws in the nineteenth century and continuing to the civil rights struggles of the twentieth. We will consider both how elite judges and ordinary people conceive of and struggle for rights, and how this has both fulfilled and frustrated the expectations of the Declaration’s promise.
History 4520: Ancient Persia, Greece, & Rome, CRN 87365, MW 2:50 – 4:35, Lela Urquhart
Ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome were three of the most significant civilizations in the ancient world. As such, they are particularly good case studies for exploring the topic of “Revolutions and Resistance in Ancient History,” using a variety of primary and secondary sources. Major topics in this class include the “Orientalizing Revolution,” the rise of the Greek city-state, the Persian Wars, Greek colonization, the Athenian democracy, the “Roman Revolution,” Romanization, and the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world.
History 4540: Britain, Ireland & British Atlantic, 1485-1689, CRN 86084 / (Honors Section CRN 87246), TR 1:00-2:45, Jake Selwood
This course will examine the history of the British Isles and their ties to the wider world from the Reformation to the Revolution of 1688. During the semester we will investigate the ways in which the larger narratives of Tudor and Stuart history - the Reformation, the consolidation of state power, and the crisis of authority that led to the civil war – shed light issues of order and disorder, authority and resistance in early modern culture. Although we will focus on the most important religious, political and constitutional changes that took place during the period, we will do so with an eye towards the questioning of traditional narratives, examining issues of gender, incipient empire, social inequality and the nature of political authority. Attention will be paid to the relationship between England and the other kingdoms of the British Isles, Britain’s ties to Europe and to the world at large and, in particular, to connections between English expansion in the Celtic fringe and burgeoning imperialism overseas. Particular emphasis will be placed on the analysis of primary documents. This course, then, aims to give students a solid grounding in the political, social and cultural history of the early modern British world. It aims to provide students with the tools to critically evaluate the work of historians writing on these topics, to analyze for themselves primary sources from the period, and to cogently express in writing their own informed conclusions.
History 4570: France Since 1715, CRN 87368, TR 1:00-2:45, Denise Davidson
This course covers the political, social, and cultural history of France from the eighteenth century to the present. Beginning with the Old Regime and the Enlightenment, we move through the Revolution of 1789 and the social and political upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The readings include novels, memoirs, and works of history.
History 4580: German History Since 1900, CRN 87366, MW 2:50-4:35, Joe Perry
In weekly lectures, readings, and discussions, this course explores the history of Germany in the twentieth century. After a brief overview of the late nineteenth century, we turn to the evolution of German society, politics, and culture from around 1900 to 1990. Main topics include: modernization, imperialism, and nationalism; industrialization and class society; the World Wars; politics and culture in the Weimar Republic; National Socialism and the Holocaust; post-war recovery; politics and daily life in East and West Germany; and the collapse of the East Block in 1989. This is a Writing Across the Curriculum course, and content draws on recent developments in social, cultural, and political history. In their term paper, students will engage theories that view gender, class, race, and sexuality as historical constructs.
History 4600, Russia and Soviet Union Since 1861, CRN 87362, MW 2:50-4:35, Hugh Hudson
A History of Russia and Soviet Union Since 1861 examines the cultural and political heritage of Russia and the Soviet Union from the period of the Great Reforms of the nineteenth century to the contemporary era. Emphasis is placed on the factors that led to the emergence of the special governmental societal structure of the Soviet Union, especially Stalinism, and efforts since 1953 to change the political and social culture, culminating in the period of Perestroika, the end of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The conflict between Russia/the Soviet Union and the West will also be analyzed. The ultimate objective of the course is for the student to be able to argue effectively in written form a thesis regarding the forces of change and continuity in Russia since 1861. HIST 4600 is a readings lecture course, with discussions to analyze specific readings and lectures.
History 4750: East Africa & Horn of Africa, CRN 87371, TR 2:50-4:35, Mohammed H. Ali
This course is designed to serve as an introduction to Eastern Africa and the Horn of African history from the earliest times to the 1960s. The course will attempt to present a panoramic treatment of the major themes and outlines of the development of social, political, cultural and economic history of Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, with special emphasis on the indigenous African civilizations.
History 4770: Western Africa, CRN 86437, TR 10:00 – 11:45, Harcourt Fuller
This course surveys West African history from early times to the present. It explores the central themes in the growth, development and continuation of indigenous West African civilizations, kingdoms and empires. The course also examines interactions between indigenous and foreign civilizations, including the ability of West African societies to adopt, absorb and utilize outside influences such as Islam, Christianity and European secular ideas.
History 4820: Cross-Cultural Encounters, CRN 84975, TR 10:00-11:45, Denis Gainty
World history is about nothing if not connections. This class investigates the ways in which various cultures have encountered one another through trade, religion, disease, the environment, technology, empire, and other media. The class draws on a range of historical examples to ask not only how cultures intersect with one another to produce world history, but – equally importantly – how historians can best work with the idea of “cultures” as units of human contact.
History 4845: The Body Politic, CRN 87367 / (Honors Section CRN 88071), TR 1:00-2:45, Denis Gainty
This class will investigate how the metaphor of the body has been employed to make sense of societies throughout history. Beginning with ancient Greek and Chinese sources and continuing through nineteenth century Social Darwinism and contemporary, postmodern bodies, this class traces change and continuity in the metaphor of the body as it has been applied to human communities. We will investigate how the notion of the body politic – with heads of state, the long arm of the law, and the health or weakness of a national economy – has connected premodern and modern humans with their social contexts around the world.
History 4860: Empires, CRN 87373, TR 2:50-4:35, Ian Fletcher
The course of history since antiquity has been shaped in large part by empires. What is an empire? How do empires rise and fall, proliferate and alternate, amid the peoples they bring together? Why are the interactions between rulers and subjects as crucial as the relations among empires? We will seek answers to these questions, with the help of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s Empires in World History and a variety of print and web primary sources. For the final project, each student will create a portfolio of documents and images about the world of empires a century ago, on the eve of the First World War.
History 4990*: Historical Research- CTW- American Politics, CRN 86891, TR 8:00 – 9:45, Larry Youngs
As the department's capstone course, History 4990 will be one of the most challenging you will take as an undergraduate history major; it should also be one of the most rewarding. This course will be taught as a research seminar. Your primary goal will be to complete an original research project (a 20-25 page essay) in the field of U.S. Political History. Students will be introduced to this topic by reading, analyzing, and discussing a representative selection of common readings. During the bulk of the semester, however, students will focus on independent reading, research, and writing.
History 4990*: Historical Research- CTW - Commemoration, CRN 83269, TR 1:00-2:45, Cliff Kuhn
The course will be organized around the theme of commemoration. How and why do people, societies and nations choose to memorialize, celebrate and honor certain events, developments and individuals of the past? Why are struggles over the meaning and interpretation of the past often so intense and bitter? What is the relationship between history, memory and myth? How does the historical study of commemoration illuminate both what is being commemorated and the circumstances of commemoration? In addition to a variety of shorter assignments, the culmination of this course will be a major research paper drawing from both primary and secondary sources.
History 4990*: Historical Research- CTW – The Rise and Fall of the Apartheid System in South Africa, 1948-1994, CRN 80524, MW 2:50 – 4:35, Mohammed H. Ali
This course is designed to serve as an introduction to important developments in South Africa from the legalization of the apartheid system in 1948 to 1994 when transfer of power took place peacefully and democratically from the party of white supremacy to the African National Congress. The course has twofold goals: the first is to explore the impact of the rise of the apartheid system had on South African society, political economy, democratic political culture, civil society, industrialization, urbanization, development of human capital and international relations from the 1940s to the early 1990s; the second, is to conduct research, organize and write a twenty-two to twenty-eighty page paper on a topic related to the rise and fall of the apartheid system in South Africa. The paper will provide the students with an opportunity to further develop their historical craft.
*Requires Departmental Approval