Untitled Document

In fall 2005 the history department instituted a new policy for senior seminars. A student will only have one opportunity to complete this course successfully. Only in extraordinary circumstances will this policy be waived and only with permission of the undergraduate coordinator.

AMH 4930
Instructor: Dr. Elizabeth Dale T 6-8, Flint 109
In the landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright the Supreme Court decided that criminal defendants had a right to counsel. We will study that case, from its trial through the Supreme Court decision, both as a piece of Florida history and as an important moment in constitutional history. Students in the seminar will then pick a Supreme Court decision and use that as the basis of their seminar paper.

AMH 4930 TBA
Instructor: Dr. Alan Petigny R 5-7, Flint 115
The Seminar will primarily focus on the African American experience from Reconstruction to the Present. While a special emphasis will be placed on the modern Civil Rights Movement, the seminar will also survey (among other things) the Harlem Renaissance, Blacks & Broadway, the early history of the NAACP, and the modern urban poverty debate. Two books reviews, weekly writing assignments, and a research paper will be among the requirements for the course.

AMH4930 Gender and Race In US History
Instructor: Dr. Louise Newman W 5-7, Flint 109
This course offers a cultural approach to the history of the United States during the post-war period, 1945 to the present. Analyzing Hollywood films, novels, memoirs, and music, we will try to understand how gender, along with other categories such as race class, and sexuality, shaped the lives of Americans during this period. We will spend the first few weeks studying the intersecting histories of gender and Cold War politics from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Then we will focus on the "sexual revolution" in the context of civil rights, the New Left, and the women's liberation movement during the 1960s and 1970s. In the final week(s) of the course, we will reflect on the consolidation and retrenchment that characterizes gender politics from the 1980s through the millennium.

EUH 4930 Religion and Politics in Medieval Spain
Instructor: Dr. Nina Caputo R 7-9, Flint 109
In the early 13th century Christian Spain was more tolerant, even accommodating, of religious and cultural difference than any other part of Latin Christendom. However, by the end of the 15th century this situation had changed completelyafter a long and difficult cultural struggle, religious tolerance was officially revoked with the establishment of the Inquisition and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Christian Spain. This class will examine the social, religious, intellectual and political circumstances that made these changes possible.

EUH 4930 Postwar Europe, 1945-48
Instructor: Dr. Alice Freifeld W 7-9, Mat 4
1945 and 1946 saw the largest migration of peoples in Europe since the third century A.D. The aftermath of World War II left the European infrastructure in ruins. Many cities had been turned to rubble. Yet it was also a moment when lives were begun again; when political systems were to be constructed anew. We will study the intellectual, political, and diplomatic responses; programs of the liberating armies, UN relief association, and other agencies, ending with the division of Europe and the Cold War. Our focus will be on the human dilemma as experienced by Holocaust survivors, the millions of German expellees, POWs, and other traumatized residents.

EUH 4930 Post-war France and Britain
Instructor: Dr. Sheryl Kroen M 6-8, Flint 109
In this seminar we will study a wide range of first-hand accounts, or efforts to "write" the period following WWII in France and Britain. We will read novels and memoirs; we will even look at some official (as in governmental) efforts to write the post-war experience through film, exhibitions, and pamphlets. Since this course will be as much about the question of how best to "write" history as it is about the post-WWII period itself, students in this seminar should be interested in literature, in the boundaries between literary and historical representations of the past. Students will write short weekly papers on the common readings (for six weeks) and then will focus all of their attention on their own research projects. Students will write, exchange, rewrite drafts, and finally hand in a 15-20-page research paper, which they will also present orally in seminar.

HIS 4930 Slavery in the Atlantic World
Instructor: Dr. David Geggus T 7-9, Flint 113
Enslaved Africans made up the great majority of transatlantic migrants (and the overwhelming majority of female migrants) who came to the Americas from Columbus’ time tot he early nineteenth century. Large areas of Africa were reorganized around the supply of this labor force. Slavery flourished in colonies from Canada to Argentina and formed the foundation of society in most tropical and subtropical lowland regions. The wealth generated by slave labor tied together four continents in new networks of global trade that involved not just slaveowners and traders but farmers, manufacturers, and shipbuilders from New England to India. Historians study slave societies, because they represent an extreme form of power relations, because of the multicultural complexity they created, and because they played an important role in the making of the modern world.

In this course we will be sampling a mixture of contemporary sources and classic historiography relating to the history of slavery in the Atlantic world between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As one of the History department’s senior seminars, the course gives students an opportunity to engage in discussion in a seminar format and to work on their analytic and writing skills.