This is a partial list of courses. For the semester's complete offerings, see the Registrar's website. The IUB Course Bulletin also has full list of History Department courses past, present, and future.
A number of history courses align with other fields of study, personal interests and current events. Have a look!
COLL C104 with Professor Robert Alan Schneider
The history of how different societies, from ancient times to the present, have "transgressed"-- that is, the history of punishment in all its forms, especially the practice of incarceration.
HIST-H104 with Professor Julia Roos
Europe’s history in the past two hundred years captures the contradictions of the modern age. We can marvel at European achievements in art, literature, and science, and at impressive advances in building democracy. At the same time, twentieth-century Europe was the epicenter of two murderous world wars. In this class, students will learn about key topics in European history since the early 1800s including, for instance: the Napoleonic Wars; the birth of nationalism; industrialization; women and the family; revolutions in 1848, 1917, and 1989; the rise and fall of colonial empires; the world wars; fascism; the Holocaust; young people’s political movements; and the Cold War.
HIST-H105 with Professor Tina Anne Irvine
What do freedom and equality mean in a country founded on Native American land and economically sustained by enslaved labor? How did competing struggles for freedom and equality make the United States the country it is today? How did race and gender shape people's perspectives and lives? This introductory lecture course seeks to answer those questions by providing students an overview of the most significant moments, trends, and developments in history in the place that became the United States between colonial encounters in the “New World” and the end of the Civil War in 1865.
HIST-H106 with Professor Micol Seigel
HIST-A112 with Professor Janine Giordano Drake
HIST-F200 with Professor Danny James
HIST-W200 with Professor Jason P. McGraw
Course will examine the concept of decolonization as a historical, political, ethical, and cultural project. We will start with history and then proceed to present-day debates over sovereignty and decolonizing knowledge. Doing so will require examining the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social identities. The bulk of coursework will entail readings and film viewings by historical and current-day actors engaged in decolonizing or decolonial movements. Students must be actively engaged in class participation. Lectures, when they happen, will be very short, and the rest of class time will run on student-led discussion.
HIST-W200 with Professor Tatiana Saburova
What can photographs tell us about the past, society and politics, daily life and family? This class is about visual history, we will read photographs as primary sources, and look for the “invisible” in pictures. We will explore photographs to see history of the modern states and wars, social protests and daily life, technology and culture in the 19th-20th centuries.
HIST-D201 with Professor Ke Chin Hsia
Interested in the recent history of democracy? Using the democratically-oriented revolutions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, South Africa, and East Asia in the 1980s as the point of departure, we ask what account for this wave of pursuit of liberal democracy and the common ideas and practices that linked them. We then consider the recent failed attempts, and the setbacks or challenges to the liberal democratic visions in Eastern Europe. From the communist revolutions and anti-communist dictatorships of the 20th century to the nationalist illiberal democracy in our times, we use first-hand accounts to engage with something that is both so fundamental yet so elusive in the modern world. GenEd S&H and WC and CASE S&H and GCC.
HIST-H206 with Professor Deborah M Deliyannis
Cities and villages, castles and cathedrals – learn what they looked like, who lived there, and what aspects of medieval life, politics, and culture are represented.
HIST-H212 with Professor Jason P. McGraw
Course examines the last 200 years of Latin American history, addressing themes of social movements, dictatorships, revolutions, and changes in race, gender, sex, class, and family life. Class will entail short lectures with longer class discussions based on assigned readings and films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru.
HIST-B215 with Professor Robert Alan Schneider
A study of the persecution of so-called witches in Europe and New England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with attention paid to their relationship to religion and "magical" beliefs. We will also look at some contemporary phenomena that beg comparison to these much earlier forms of belief.
HIST-C220 with Professor Colin Peter Elliott
A close, critical and engaging study of ancient Greek and Roman leaders. Our investigation connects students to the lives of the leaders themselves, as well as to the overriding cultural, political and social values that defined these individuals as 'leaders' in the first place.
HIST-H239 with Professor Judith A Allen
Join us in a broad survey of Western medical knowledges and practices, from ancient to contemporary forms –including the history of leeches, epidemics (e.g. the Black Plague [1347-52], amputation, ether, bacteria, asepsis, hormones, viruses, antibiotics, anovulant birth control, auto-immune diseases, stem-cell therapeutics, and vaccinology. We'll tackle varying thematic concentrations including “medicalization” and its critics, public health, medical policies and insurance; medicine and the state (e.g. interwar eugenic sterilization, Nazi regimes, nuclear accidents like Chernobyl [1986], the British NHS); and the representations of medicine within fiction and popular culture, from "Frankenstein" (1818) to "Grey's Anatomy" (2005 to date).
HIST-H270 with Professor Julia Roos
What is the historian’s task? “Simply to show how it really was,” was the answer of nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke. Is it that easy? How do we know how it really was? In this course, we will explore vital questions of the process of history-writing: the choices historians make, and the influence their own society and times have on these choices. We will ask why only some facts, but not others, become part of the historical record. Students will learn about different methods historians use for interpreting historical sources, and about different analytical approaches to explaining historical change.
HIST-A300 with Professor Sara M. Gregg
HIST-D300 with Professor Tatiana Saburova
In this class we will examine the origins, major episodes and results of the Cold War but go beyond the traditional political history and the international relations to discuss visual culture of the Cold War and its media, personal and social memory of the Cold War, the technological competition and its impact on science and education, the daily life and material culture, sport and cultural exchanges. It's a part of IU Global Classroom and we discuss histories of the Cold War with students and faculty from the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg, Russia) and work together on the course projects.
HIST-J300 with Professor Cara C Caddoo
How has advertising, PR & propaganda attempted to influence the public's desires and opinions? How have ordinary people--workers, women, and racial minorities--responded? Our class will consider the strange and surprising history of public information and persuasion and its connections to Americans' contested definitions of citizenship, democracy, and capitalism. This is a writing-intensive course. Students are expected to complete weekly reading assignments, actively participate in class discussions, and produce an original 10-page research paper based on primary and secondary sources.
HIST-J300 with Professor Konstantin Dierks
What were the roots of capitalism in American history? The nineteenth century was a century of growth and panics, factories and slave plantations, westward expansion and global trade, unstable money and wildcat banks, railroads and telegraphs, the harnessing of steam and the discovery of oil, business law and consumer advertising, engineering innovation and environmental damage. Was capitalism savior, or curse?
HIST-J300 with Professor Juan I Mora
Amid the contemporary global health crisis, politicians, pundits, and the public in the United States have grappled with and reevaluated the meaning of essential workers. Throughout the twentieth century, migrant agricultural labor is one of the few occupations that has been consistently mobilized because of its “indispensability” to the national economy. Through reading, writing, and discussion, we will examine the role of temporary guest worker programs, the labor and living conditions of migrant farmworkers, and the various interpretations of justice.
HIST-J300 with Professor Danny James
HIST-H301 with Professor Kalani Craig
What can we learn about the past from our collective present? What are the pitfalls of writing "a history of us"? We'll use digital-history methods to analyze, negotiate, and present the paths that led us to IU, how those paths represent historical change and continuity, and our different, and often diffcult, historical perspectives. Along the way, we'll study the history of digital methods, their roots in the history of technology in the 20th century, and how that history can inform historians' use of technology in the future.
HIST-A302 with Professor Benjamin Hylton Irvin
In recent months a national debate has raged about the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. How might we best understand that momentous conflict? As a Great War for Empire, in which shifting alliances of European and indigenous peoples waged combat for dominion over eastern North America? As a Revolutionary War, in which thirteen colonies confederated in a fight for political autonomy? As a civil war that rent the British nation? Or as a war of liberation, one of several that unfolded across the greater Atlantic, giving the era its name, the Age of Revolutions? In this reading- and discussion-intensive seminar, we will carefully examine the interpretive frameworks by which historians make sense of the Revolution today.
HIST-B323 with Professor Irit Dekel
HIST-B348 with Professor Daniel Folger Caner
A survey of Byzantine Roman history and civilization, focusing on its medieval, “middle period” ca. 813-1204.
HIST-W350 with Professor Ke Chin Hsia
Baseball is a social and cultural phenomenon transcending national boundaries. It is an ongoing history that tells a lot about the past and the present. This course takes a thematic approach to explore history through the prism of baseball, and baseball from a perspective that is both global and historical. We look at how myth, community, memory, colonialism, and capitalism shape baseball in the U.S., East Asia, and Latin America. Major League Baseball is only part of a much broader intellectual adventure of this course. Both baseball fans and non-fans are welcomed. You just need to know the rules of the game and are interested in baseball as history. CASE S&H credit.
HIST-A363 with Professor Eric T. Sandweiss
From Tecumseh to Richard Lugar, from Madame CJ Walker to Kurt Vonnegut, the residents of Indiana have broken cultural and political ground for more than two centuries. Their land—from the Indiana Dunes to the Falls of the Ohio—abounds with key sites in American history. Yet Hoosiers themselves will tell you that this is just an average place, full of hardworking people minding their own business. What is the “real” story behind the Hoosier image? This class welcomes natives and newcomers alike to join in a historical discovery tour and take part in a frank discussion of the Hoosier Way…from the 1700s to the day after tomorrow. Fulfills CASE S&H
HIST-C377 with Professor Eric Wild Robinson
Students will explore ancient Greek history from the Classical age to the Hellenistic era. Topics will include the Athenian Empire, artistic and architectural advances, democracy as experienced in Athens and other city-states, philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, the eclipse of the city-state and rise of Macedonia, and the cultural flourishing of the Hellenistic age. Students will read (in translation) the works of several ancient authors in part or in whole, and learn about the varieties of evidence that historians use to understand the history and culture of Greece. Assignments will include two short papers, a midterm, and a final exam.
HIST-A380 with Professor Nick Cullather
This is the story of America’s second longest war, a war that defined a generation and continues to provide instructive and chilling parallels to events of the present day. We will discuss the war’s origins amid the decline of the French empire, the gradually increasing United States military involvement, the political and military strategies employed by both sides, the anti-war movement, and the repercussions of defeat. Nearly everything about the war remains controversial, and assignments will engage with contentious historical and political questions while lectures will provide a chronological and narrative structure to the course. Keywords: military history, '60, sixties, race, imperialism, Cod War, international, Southeast Asia.
HIST-A383 with Professor Michael Edward McGerr
Does music matter? Music is everywhere in American life, but it’s “just” music, only entertainment, right? Not necessarily. This course explores how music, partly because it is seemingly so unimportant, has played a critical role in the transformation of American society from World War II to the present.
HIST-J400 with Professor Alex Lichtenstein
How can you find, interpret, and analyze historical sources? This research seminar for senior history majors will lead you through the research process using a diverse array of international examples from the twentieth century. You will learn how to find and read historical newspapers, correspondence, diaries, photographs, correspondence, pamphlets, oral histories, government and diplomatic records, trial transcripts, hearings, comic books, films, autobiographies, and more. Your primary written assignment will be a research paper based on your access to such sources, both digitized and in print, accessible in IU’s libraries. Topics include gender, labor, anti-colonialism, human rights, transnational social movements, Cold War diplomacy.
HIST-J400 with Professor Eric Wild Robinson
What has democracy looked like in different historical periods? What are its principles? How have popular revolutions unfolded in different eras? These are some of the questions this class will try to answer as we examine different historical takes on democracy and popular revolution. Early on the class will focus on examples of these historical events (from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary world) and different ways historians have treated them. As the semester progresses, attention will be given to helping students conduct their own research into these subjects as they plan to write a research paper on a topic of their choice connected to democracy or political revolution.
HIST-J400 with Professor Fei Hsien Wang
HIST-J425 with Professor Deborah M Deliyannis
HIST-J425 with Professor Konstantin Dierks
The College of Arts + Sciences
