COURSES
Fall 2016 Course Descriptions
500-700 Level
SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE! Always check the University online schedule for the latest changes.
HIS 510 - Historiography: Writing History From Above and Below
85663 W 3:30-6:20
Emily Levine
What constitutes an appropriate historical method? What sources are valid and why? What justifies who and what gets included and the topics that are ignored? This course focuses on how the answers to these questions have changed over time. It offers an introduction to the themes and approaches that have been influential in the historical profession from the late 19th century through to today. It is intended for advanced undergraduates who are planning to teach history or enter into the historical profession, essential for graduate students who wish to be literate in the field, and open to anyone who is interested in rigorously interrogating texts for their presentations of argument, objectivity, perspective, and narrative. Selected readings by such philosophers and practicing historians as Bloch, Ranke, Marx, Braudel, Thompson, Foucault, Scott, and Said. Pr. Admission to a graduate program in history, or permission of instructor.
HIS 511A - Seminar in Historical Research and Writing: "Crisis to Crisis: Cold War, Racial Conflict, and Urban Revolt, 1962-1968"
85604 T 3:30-6:20
Thomas Jackson
In arguably what were the first years of our time, the United States seemed to be propelled from crisis to crisis, at home and abroad. Many groups were inspired by the struggles of African Americans against second class citizenship and police violence to assert their equal participation in democracy. A conservative popular revolt against the Establishment within the Republican Party ended in humiliation for the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, but laid the foundations for a new conservatism. Even then, the nation was frustrated by American efforts to control nations at war with themselves amid rising big-power tensions, which came terrifyingly close to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. New media of communications helped shake up politics, sexuality, and women's sense of their possibilities. Student freedom riders escaped burning busses in Alabama, and then fanned out across the South to make a voting rights revolution. Movements pressured, Presidents proposed, and Congress passed the most far reaching legislation in race relations since Reconstruction. They also overhauled an archaic system of immigration restriction, and initiated a multi-pronged War on Poverty. But military intervention against Vietnamese communists escalated in ways that cramped reform at home. And triggered by violent confrontations between police and citizens in big-city neighborhoods, 200 race riots challenged Americans to provide opportunity and reform police practices, to forestall the coming of a widely-feared "race war." And in response, conservative forces regrouped behind slogans of "law and order," laying the basis for modern "color-blind" conservatism.
This course will begin with introductory readings in scholarship and primary sources. Students will then develop individual research questions in issue-focused "affinity groups." Expect to improve your proficiency in speaking, writing, and information literacy, though the planning and production of a 25 page research paper.
Writing and Speaking Intensive. Prerequisite of one 300-level Research Intensive (RI) history course or HIS 391.
Field: United States. Markers: .WI.SI.
HIS 511B - Seminar in Historical Research and Writing: "The Great Hunger: Ireland, Empire, & Famine"
83264 R 3:30-6:20
Jill Bender
Writing and Speaking Intensive. Prerequisite of one 300-level Research Intensive (RI) history course or HIS 391.
During the mid-nineteenth century, Ireland suffered a series of famines that nearly halved the island's population - in less than one decade, from 1846 to 1855, between 1.1 and 1.5 million people died at the hands of starvation or disease and another 2.1 million emigrated. The difficulties of these years were captured at the time and later recalled through art, literature, music, and more. Indeed, few (if any) events have had a larger impact on Irish history, politics, or national memory than "The Great Hunger." This course is designed to introduce students to the history of the Irish Famine and its repercussions. Together, we will examine the broad political, social, and cultural impacts of the Famine. Individually, students will conceptualize,
research, and write papers on a related topic of their own choosing.
Field: Europe. Markers: .WI.SI.
HIS 511C - Seminar in Historical Research and Writing: "Popular Protest in Chinese History"
84672 M 3:30-6:20
James Anderson
Writing and Speaking Intensive. Prerequisite of one 300-level Research Intensive (RI) history course or HIS 391.
This course will examine the nature of popular protest in Chinese history. Topics examined during the semester will include the role religion played as a source of social volatility in traditional Chinese culture and society, peasant revolutions, the May Fourth Movement, popular protest in the rise of nationalism and communism, and domestic political protest since the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China. Most importantly, students in this course will be responsible for individual research projects, for which they will locate and use historical source materials, written and oral, published and unpublished. Comparing and analyzing a variety of primary source materials, students will write their own histories of Chinese popular protest and in the end develop their skills in observing societies with different origins than their own.
Field: Wider World. Markers: .WI.SI.
HIS 514 - World History Topics: "History of the Future"
84672 TR 5:00-6:15
Eric Oakley
What can we know about the world of tomorrow? Scholars rarely discuss the future as "historical" time. Historians cannot make predictions about events to come, but we can propose a range of possible futures. This course seeks to open our global future to serious investigation using methods of historical thinking. Students will assess the period 2025-2100 in terms of the continuation of past and present global trends, versus plausible changes in the future. The course considers the concept of "modernity" through topics such as urbanization, cosmopolitanism, wellness, space exploration, indigenous societies, global governance, energy, catastrophe, religion, and nature. Students will use methods in strategic forecasting to make nuanced projections about the near future. Meanwhile, classroom simulations will model international crises such as resource war, climate refugees, pandemic disease, failed states, and reform of the United Nations.
Undergraduates only. Field: Wider World.
HIS 524 - 20th Century U.S. Topics: "Voting Rights in Recent U.S. History"
86168 M 3:30-6:20
Lisa Levenstein
This course will help students contextualize their participation in the 2016 election and share their knowledge with the public. In the first half of the semester, we will explore how the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded democracy while inspiring a counterrevolution that has curtailed the voting rights of minorities, youth, poor people, and the elderly. Prior to the election, students will organize a campus teach-in to present this history to the UNCG community. The second part of the semester will be spent examining the struggle for women's voting rights in the early twentieth century. Students will conduct primary source research that will contribute to a national crowdsourcing project compiling the biographies of militant woman suffragists. They will receive authorship credit for the biographies they contribute to this online project. An eagerness to share history with the public and work collaboratively with other students is necessary for success in this course.
Field: United States. Markers: .AFS.WGS
HIS 542 - Middle Ages Topics: "Violence in the Middle Ages"
86169 TR 2:00-3:15
Richard Barton
This course examines the meaning and consequences of violence during the Middle Ages. We will move topically through a selection of primary sources (Gregory of Tours, Galbert of Bruges, Saga of Njall, Raoul of Cambrai, etc) and scholarly analyses of war and peace, feuding, dispute resolution, chivalry, and lordship. As we do so we shall attempt to grapple with some fundamental questions: how did medieval people define 'violence', if they did so at all? How did violence differ from 'force'? Did medieval people consider violent acts to be necessarily bad? If so, under what circumstances? Were certain social orders and/or institutions more or less associated with violence? That is, was violence a component of lordship? To what degree was violence a subjective category imposed by authors, and to what degree was it universal? This course will investigate these and many other questions pertaining to medieval representations of force, violence, and social norms.
Field: Europe.
HIS 543 - Historic Preservation: Principles and Practices
80452 W 2:00-4:50
Jo Leimenstoll (Interior Architecture)
Prerequisite of IAR 221, IAR 222, or permission of instructor.
Change in historic preservation theory and practice since the 1800s with emphasis on preservation of built environment and development of philosophical approach for designers to contemporary preservation projects. (Same as IAR 543)
HIS 547 - History Museum Curatorship: Collections Management
86170 W 6:30-9:20
Diana Bell-Kite
This course will explore the legal, ethical, and practical issues associated with the development, management, and care of museum collections. Students will investigate and analyze contemporary issues and debates within the field of history curatorship and learn what it means to be physically and intellectually responsible for museum collections. Through readings, discussions, expert presentations, site visits, a daylong cataloging workshop, and a semester-long real-world collecting project, students will learn about best practices in curatorship and collections management. Prerequisite: Admission to a graduate program in history or written permission of instructor. Same as IAR 547.
Prerequisite for all 600- 700 level History courses: Admission to a graduate program in history or interior architecture, or written permission of instructor.
HIS 627 - Museum and Historic Site Interpretation: Principles and Practice
86173 T 6:30-9:20
Benjamin Filene
Who makes history and how? This seminar explores the relationship between history and public audiences, focusing on the theory and practice of telling stories through museums and historic sites. It introduces students to the tools that public historians use to interpret the past, explores key dilemmas in public interpretation and community collaboration, and examines contemporary models for how best to reach audiences in ways that make history meaningful. Topics include learning theory, audience evaluation, oral history, photography and material culture, exhibitions, audience evaluation, and visitor-generated interpretation. The course will culminate in a local history project, produced by the students for a public venue. Same as IAR 627.
HIS 629 - Museum Education
86174 T 6:30-9:20
Edith Brady
This course surveys the basic principles and practices of museum education, emphasizing facilitated experiences. Through reading works by researchers and practitioners in the field, students will explore the kinds of learning that occur in museums and how that learning takes place. As well, students themselves will practice the skills and techniques utilized by museum educators.
HIS 633 - Community History Practicum
82287 M 3:30-6:20
Anne Parsons
Prerequisite: HIS/IAR 626
In this hands-on course, students work collaboratively and engage community partners as they research, design, and complete public projects - previously planned in HIS/IAR 626 - that engage audiences in local/regional history. These projects involve original research and draw on a range of sources that drive public history work, including public records, oral interviews, images, and artifacts. Final products may involve exhibitions, web-based products, public programs, curricula, or other formats that engage public audiences in issues emerging from the past around us.
This course is restricted to graduate students in History and Interior Architecture who have completed HIS/IAR 626 (The Practice of Public History) unless permission is granted by instructor.
See the M.A. FAQ for more information about the following:
HIS 690 - Internship
HIS 692 - Advanced Topics
HIS 697 - Independent Study
HIS 699 - Thesis
Written permission is required to register for these courses.
HIS 701 - Colloquium in American History
80470 701-01 T 3:30-6:20
Watson Jennison
86175 701-02 R 6:30-9:20
Mark Elliott
Issues of historical interpretation from the Revolution through the Civil War.
HIS 703 - Seminar in History
see online schedule for correct section
Time/location arranged with student's mentor
Research and writing on selected topics in history.
HIS 706 - Colloquium in European History since 1789
86363 M 3:30-6:20
Jeff Jones
The American Heritage Dictionary defines "colloquium" as "an academic seminar on a broad field of study, usually led by a different lecturer at each meeting." This graduate-level "Colloquium in European History from 1789" holds true to that definition by having students facilitate discussions of some of the most important works representing the major historiographical trends, issues, and problems in modern European history from the French Revolution through World War II. The class is arranged around weekly discussions of texts covering a wide range of topics; classes will be led by teams of students who will facilitate discussion by formulating questions germane to that week's text. Our primary tasks will be to identify authors' arguments, methodologies, and source bases, as well as to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their works.
HIS 710 - Colloquium in the Atlantic World
84679 W 3:30-6:20
Colleen Kriger
This course is designed to be an introduction to the history of the Atlantic trading system, the historiography of Atlantic World Studies, and comparative or cross-cultural approaches to historical research. As a relatively new way of conceptualizing and framing historical questions -- on a much larger geographical and temporal scale than more familiar units of analysis such as a nation state or an ethnic/language/social group -- the 'Atlantic World' serves also as an entry point into and example of thinking and teaching about global history.
HIS 720 - Public History Capstone I
83854 W 3:30-6:20
Benjamin Filene
This course is part of a two-semester sequence in which students design and execute original, research-driven, independent-study history projects for public audiences, usually with a community or institutional partner. In the first half of the course sequence, students solidify the goals and contours of the project, complete project research, and finish preliminary development. Restricted to graduate students in the history department's Museum Studies program who have completed at least 15 hours of graduate-level course work.
HIS 724 - 20th Century Topics: "The United States: Depression and War, 1929-1948"
86805 R 3:30-6:20
Charles Bolton
This course will examine two key events in twentieth-century U.S. History, the Great Depression and World War II, and the impact they had on the political, economic, social, and cultural lives of Americans. Among the topics that will be covered are the origins and impact of the economic depression, the development of the New Deal, the role of Franklin D. Roosevelt during this era, the American diplomatic and military experience during World War II, and the impact of the war on the American home front. We will also explore the growth of organized labor, the changes in race and gender relations, and the transformation of the U.S. South during this period.
200-400 Courses | Advising Center | Undergraduate Bulletin | Courses
