History 350-364, African and Latin American History

 

HIS 350/Topics in African or Latin American History

(periodically)
Focuses on differing topics of historical significance having to do with African or Latin American history. This course may be repeated for credit when the topic changes. May fulfill departmental distribution requirements.

Liberal Learning:

• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

 

HIS 351/Ancient and Medieval Africa

(periodically)
This introductory course surveys ancient and medieval African history through the eyes of princesses, archaeologists, peasants, religious leaders, storytellers, and women. While the course reconstructs the great civilizations of ancient Africa—Egypt, Zimbabwe, Mali, and others—it is not primarily focused on kings and leaders. Rather, the course explore how ordinary Africans ate, relaxed, worshiped, and organized their personal and political lives.

Liberal Learning:

• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

 

HIS 352/Colonial and Modern Africa

(periodically)
This course explores African history from 1800 up to the present. Using case studies, it will examine how wide-ranging social, political, and economic processes—the slave trade, colonial rule, African nationalism, independence, and new understandings of women’s rights—changed local people’s lives.

Liberal Learning:

• GLOBAL
• GLOBAL; RACE & ETHNICITY
• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

 

HIS 353/African History in Film, Literature and Music

(periodically)
Explores the ways that African novelists, musicians, and filmmakers have memorialized Africa’s past. In the films of Mweze Ngangura, in the songs of Lomwe plantation workers, in the creative writing of African novelists, students will learn how trained artists and ordinary people alike use the arts to think through history. How art comments on political relations in the present is also an enduring theme.

Liberal Learning:

• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

 

HIS 354/South African History

(periodically)
This survey course explores the politics of culture in colonial-era and apartheid South Africa. It begins by studying the legal, religious, sexual and political history of colonialism, then delves into the history of African popular culture. How miners, beer brewers, women, musicians, gangsters, and journalists created cultures of resistance is an enduring theme. In the second half of the semester, students will create research papers about topics in South African history.

 

HIS 355/East African History

(periodically)
East Africa is probably the most politically, ecologically, and religiously diverse place on earth. This topical course compares different East African histories. It explores three thematic questions: 1) Faced with East Africa’s inherent diversity of thought, how did African innovators create wider political communities? 2) How far did Arab elites dominate political life in the towns along the Indian Ocean coast, and how did African slaves, workmen, and other non-elites challenge their Arab overlords? 3) How did rural peasant communities reformulate their own political thought to deal with a changing world? Students will create research papers about topics in East African history.

 

HIS 356/State and Slavery in West Africa

(periodically)
This topical course studies West African history through the lens of slavery. It studies the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on African political life during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. It also explores indigenous forms of inequality, documenting how African social and political hierarchies were transformed out of their interaction with the Atlantic commerce.

 

HIS 357/Religion and Politics in Africa.

(periodically)
This course explores aspects of Africa’s religious and political history. Topics include: Africans and the making of African Christianity; African Traditional Religion and its history; sorcery and political critique in post-colonial Africa; and Islam in Africa. Students will create research papers about Africa’s history of religion.

 

HIS 358/Colonial Latin America

(periodically)
Covers from the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the 16th century through to the achievement of Latin American independence in the early 19th century.

Liberal Learning:

• GLOBAL; RACE & ETHNICITY
• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

 

HIS 359/Modern Latin America

(periodically)
Social, economic, cultural and political history of Latin America during the past two centuries.

Liberal Learning:

• GLOBAL
• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES

 

HIS 361/History of Mexico

(periodically)
A concise survey of Indian Mexico and the Spanish legacy followed by an intensive study of Mexico’s quest for independence—political, economic, and cultural—with particular attention to the Revolution of 1910–1920.

 

HIS 364/ History of the Caribbean

(periodically) This course takes a long historical, sociological, economic, and political view of the Caribbean Basin. It examines the origins of the region as a unique cultural and political space defined by the interplay between the indigenous inhabitants, African Slaves, Asian immigrants, European empires (Spanish, Dutch, French, and English), and American hegemony. The course explains the Caribbean Basin as a dynamic historical space defined by the diversity of its inhabitants, tensions between cultures, relationship to its past, and efforts to fit into an expanding culture of global capitalism.

Liberal Learning:

• GLOBAL; RACE & ETHNICITY
• SOCIAL CHANGE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES & CIVIC RESPONSIBILITIES