HISTORY COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

HIST 201 | HIST 383 | HIST 355

HIST 201
Introduction to the Study of History

This course introduces students to the strategies, methods and critical thinking skills necessary for the study of history. The class includes instruction on conducting scholarly research, interpreting primary and secondary evidence and the writing of analytical papers. Students are also introduced to issues of historical epistemology, historiography and the ways that the practice of studying and writing history has changed over time. Students should enroll in this course the first semester they declare history as a major.

HIST 383
Japan and the Shogun Age

The history of Tokugawa (1600-1868) or early modern Japan: the age of shogun, samurai, castle-towns, kabuki actors, geisha courtesans and woodblock prints. Emphasis will be placed on the problem of how warriors produced more than two centuries of peace. The course also will investigate the political, economic and cultural patterns that laid the foundation for Japan’s emergence as a modern nation. Prerequisite: Any 100-level social science course or permission of the instructor.

HIST 355 C
Trials of the U.S. Twentieth Century: American Legal Dramas and Social Change

During the twentieth century, certain legal dramas grabbed headlines in the United States and piqued the public interest.  From the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb to the aftershocks of Roe v. Wade, Americans have watched, debated, and created meaning from symbolic legal confrontations that have had resonance far beyond the narrow confines of a courthouse.  Observers often understood these events within frameworks grounded in different kinds of twentieth-century “trials” — social struggles over moral codes; changing conceptions of men, women, and sexuality; or conflicts over racial ideologies, to name several.  This class will discuss these twentieth-century courtroom confrontations as legal trials that had connections, both implicit and explicit, to the wider social trials besetting U.S. society, particularly those in the 1920s and the 1960s, which often directly involved such issues as race, class, and gender.