COURSES
Summer 2021 History Course Descriptions
All classes are scheduled online. SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE! Always check the University online schedule for the latest changes.
Session I - May 12 through June 16, 2021
HIS 208-01 - Topics in the West and the Modern World: "Workers of the World: A Global Labor History"
50026 ONLINE
Connor Harney
Writing in the early nineteenth century, Romantic Poet William Blake once described the emergent factory system of his native England as a series of "dark satanic mills." Only sixty years later, another critical commentator remarked that the same systemic logic that confined a large portion of the English population to toil in those infernal factories, was also been responsible for "turning Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting" of slaves. It was these comingled processes, he said, that "signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production." But these deep critiques of the then ascendant modern economic order simply tell us about how those labor regimes appeared from the outside, neither man gave their sweat and blood on the factory floors of an industrializing Europe nor on the slave plantations of the Americas. In this class, we will seek to, as historian E.P. Thompson did for the English hand-loom weaver and cropper, to rescue working people of all backgrounds and across the globe from "the enormous condescension of posterity." Moving beyond a centralized focus on wage labor and the factory system, we will look at disparate regimes of labor and those caught up in them. More than simply understanding how labor structured the daily lives of workers, we will seek to understand how they either survived, thrived in, or resisted those coercive systems from the eighteenth century to the present.
Field: Europe. Markers: .GHP.GL.GPM
HIS 211-01 - United States History to 1865
50029 ONLINE
Carolyn Lindley
General survey of American history from colonization through the Civil War.
Field: United States. Markers: .GHP.GMO
HIS 217-20 - The World in the Twentieth Century (1900-1945)
50623 ONLINE
Mark Moser
Political, social, and economic forces affecting Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. 1900-1945.
Field: Wider World. Markers: GHP.GMO.GN.IGS
HIS 335-01 - America Before the Revolution: Moments of Crisis in the Colonial South
Writing Intensive
50033 ONLINE
Greg O'Brien
This course makes the point that moments of crisis, revolt, and rebellion were not new with the American Revolution but had been occurring from virtually the moment that Europeans and Africans arrived in the Americas and began interacting with American Indians. Of the dozens of such events in colonial America we will focus on four in Virginia and the Carolinas: Bacon’s Rebellion (1670s Virginia), the Tuscarora War (1710s North Carolina), the Stono Rebellion (1730s-40s South Carolina), and the Regulator Movement (1760s North Carolina). Through these representative samples, students will learn about the issues and conditions that drove indentured servants and small farmers to seek redress of their grievances through violent means, Native people to resist colonial encroachment, and Africans to rebel against their enslavement.
Field: United States. Markers: .GMO.WI
HIS 426 and 526 - Selected Topics in the Civil War and Reconstruction: American Nationalism and the Second Founding
Speaking Intensive
Undergraduate section 426-01: 50034 MTWR 12:20-2:20 ONLINE synchronous
Graduate section 526-01: 50035 MTWR 12:20-2:20 ONLINE synchronous
Mark Elliott
This course examines the transformation of American nationalism with a particular focus on the Reconstruction period. Historians have begun to view the profound changes that the nation underwent during the Civil War and its aftermath as a "Second Founding" period that remade the nation’s constitutional and national identity. Conflicting ideas about nationalism led to the Civil War and the conflict itself generated more forms of American national identity. American antislavery nationalism triumphed but also morphed into new forms during Reconstruction. Confederate nationalism did not die but transformed itself and survived well beyond its time. What have been the lasting legacies of this period for American nationalism? Students will examine both primary and secondary sources and conduct their own historical research into different aspects of this topic.
Field: United States. Marker: .SI
Session II - June 17 through July 22, 2021
SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE! Always check the University online schedule for the latest changes.
HIS 209-11 - Topics in Modern World History II: "Native Americas - Caribbean"
50645 ONLINE Arlen Hanson
A survey of indigenous histories in Latin America, Southwest Borderlands and the Caribbean, from pre-contact to 1850.Field: Wider World. Markers: .GHP .GMO .GN .IGS.
HIS 210-11 - Human Rights in Modern World History"
50028 ONLINE
Jewel Parker
This course provides a conceptual and historical introduction to the idea of human rights, surveying major developments in the advocacy of human rights around the globe from 1760 to the present. Focusing on a selection of important events, historical figures, and international issues of global significance, this course explores human rights in international law, transnational movements, and global causes. By understanding how claims of "humanity" arise from grassroots struggles, this course will widen the historical inquiry on this topic from a World, rather than Eurocentric, perspective. The concept of "human rights" has not remained static over time; it has been a contested idea and the subject of debate and disagreement among its advocates as well as its detractors. Placing the debates around, and the uses of, "human rights" in historical context will be the main endeavor of this course.
Field: Wider World. Markers: .GHP.GL.GMO
HIS 212-11 - United States History since 1865
50030 ONLINE
Ashley Loper-Nowak
General survey of American history from Reconstruction to the present.
Field: United States. Markers: .GHP.GMO
HIS 218-11 - The World since 1945
50031 ONLINE
Matthew Hintz
This class will examine global issues in the contemporary world, focusing mainly on the post-World War II period, from the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, to the complex, high-tech, evolving world of today. We will examine some of the important political, economic, social, and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century and how these changes have shaped the world we live in today.
Field: Wider World. Markers: .GHP.GMO.GN.IGS
HIS 347-11 - North Carolina History
50032 ONLINE
Christine Flood
History of North Carolina from its colonial origins to the twentieth century, including the evolution of its political system, economy, social structure, and culture.
Field: United States.
