Same as Asian American Studies 15C. The course provides an interdisciplinary survey of the history, social organization, and cultural representations of Asians immigrating to the United States prior to World War II. Topics to be discussed include: early globalization, immigration patterns, the impact of Asians on the emergence of the notion of nonwhiteness in the American race relations, community development, institutionalized racism and resistance. This course is open to all students and meets the Multi-cultural VII-A general education requirement. It is also the first of a three-quarter introductory sequence that is mandatory for students who want to major or minor in Asian American Studies. If you are not majoring/minoring in Asian American Studies, the sequence can be used to fulfill the Social Science general education breadth requirement.

Covers major themes of world historical development through the mid-seventeenth century, focusing on the Eurasian world, but with secondary emphasis on Africa and the Americas.

Same as Classics 36A. Particular emphasis will be placed upon primary texts and we will read selections from Homer, Hesiod and the lyric poets as well as relevant selections from later authors who discussed these periods in Greece. Quizzes, midterm, one short paper, and final examination. No prerequisites. Non-majors are most welcome. This course is the first part of the Greek civilization series (36ABC), which satisfies the IV. Humanistic Inquiry General Education requirement.

This course focuses primarily on the social and cultural dimensions of colonial America that helped shape the United States. Topics include Native American societies before European contact, the encounters of Native American, European, and Africans in North America, the relations of race, class and gender, and the formation of attitudes and institutions.

An introduction to the historical problems, the issues of interpretation, the primary sources, and the historical scholarship of the history of Asia.

Monsters appear regularly in European literature, political polemic, and geographical works (c.400-1700). In order to better understand the role played by the horrific and fantastic in historical events and their recollection, this class will explore how different European communities used the portrayal of monsters to define the boundaries of their communities, promote reform, and establish hierarchical political orders by examining 3 test cases: 1) monsters found on the borders of European civilization, 2) cannibalism & reform, and 3) demons and witches.

Please contact Professor Seed (seed5@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

Please contact Professor Chaturvedi (vinayak@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

Same as LitJrn 103 (Lec A), German 150 (Lec A), and Intl St 179 (Lec D).

This course, the first in a three-quarter sequence, explores the development of Britain from the accession of George I to the implementation of the Reform Act in 1832. Attention will be given to the construction of a British national identity through a close examination of the cultural, social, and political history of the period.

This class provides an overview of the history of France from the French Revolution of 1789 to the end of the 19th century. We will address such subjects as the revolutionary tradition, class structure and class relations, the central role of Paris in French political and cultural life, relations within the family and between genders. Short assigments, one paper, mid-term, final.

Imperial Russian history traditionally examines the years 1682 to 1917, an enlightening and fascinating time in the development of one of the largest and most influential nations in the world. Whereas most courses on this subject begin with Peter the Great’s reforms, this course will begin earlier in Russian history in order to convey an understanding of how and why some of the myths and misconceptions held by the rest of the world with regard to Russia came about. Themes to be examined include ruler-elite dynamics, peasant-landlord relations, the uses of religion and history in the ideological justification for particular choices in statecraft, and social, political and cultural changes. These themes taken together will make possible an analysis of the significant Russian differences from and similarities to concurrent developments in institutions, politics, economics, intellectual and popular cultures elsewhere. In turn, such an analysis can provide students with a better general understanding of the imperatives driving Russian solutions to the demands and opportunities of Russian circumstances.

The war of 1914-18 is known in European history as the Great War. The first of the “total wars” of the twentieth century, it profoundly transformed the map of Europe, destroying empires and reshaping political systems, international diplomacy, social and economic institutions, gender relations, and cultures around the world. Because the peace treaties signed at the end of the war did not resolve the international and domestic conflicts that gave rise to it in the first place, Europe found itself once again at war a mere twenty years later. This course examines the origins, conduct and consequences of the Great War from multiple perspectives—military, but also political, economic, social, cultural and diplomatic. Topics will include the pre-war arms race and the alliance system, European imperialism and the globalization of the war, the nature of “total war,” the Peace of Paris, the Russian Revolution, cultural responses to the war, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the impact of the world depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the failure of collective security. To enhance our understanding of this period, we will examine a variety of literary and visual sources. Grades will be based on a midterm, a final, several short papers, and active participation in discussion section.

This course surveys Jewish history from the French Revolution until the present. It will examine the issues of political and social emancipation, assimilation, religious reform, the creation of antisemitism, the rise of Zionism, the involvement of Jews in capitalism and socialism, the Holocaust, and the founding of Israel. Geographically, the class will travel from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States.

This course will use art created by Africans, European visitors, and colonial residents as a way of exploring the role of culture in colonial encounters. Many of the objects we will examine have fallen between the cracks of existing art history scholarship, considered either ethnographic objects, amateurish, or scientific illustration rather than “art.” Looking carefully at the contexts of production, the forms, and the ways in which items circulated reveals a wide range of artistic creation in colonial Southern Africa. A focus on art provides insights not available to historians working predominantly with textual sources; this inquiry shows the profundity of colonial interactions from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

This course covers the evolution of ships and sailing principally from the Ancient World through the Renaissance. The course will cover the following topics: the basics of physical oceanography (winds, tides, currents), the evolution of ships and sailing in the ancient Mediterranean world, the Norse in the North Atlantic, Polynesia, the South China Sea, The Arab Indian Ocean, the global oceanic world. The discovery of the science of celestial navigation and terrestrial navigation will be covered.

Please contact Professor Wiener (wiener@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

Please contact Professor Rosenberg (nrosenbe@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

Increasing Sino-American interactions have emerged as one of the most visible and most important bilateral relationships in the 21st century with far-reaching impact within the Pacific Rim and beyond, making the Pacific Rim the new center of gravity in the new global geopolitical and economic order. This class seeks to analyze the development of such interactions from the late 18th century to the present. Recent media and academic discussions of the Pacific Rim have not paid adequate attention to its historical roots, and they have tended to focus on economic aspects. In this class, we will try to combine the economic and cultural perspectives in an effort to have a historically-grounded understanding. In the epic story taking place in the Pacific Rim, Chinese Americans were among the most important players. Resisting continuous and often efforts to erase their presence in the U.S., Chinese Americans have not only enriched America’s cultural diversity but also enhanced transpacific connections. Topics include the following: pre-20th century contact between what was called “the World’s Oldest and Newest Empires;” China's changing global positions; education; China's changing economy; Orientalism; Chinatown and its meanings; the changing meaning of being Chinese and American. Besides the written texts, we will also “read” several visual texts.

Same as AsianAm 111, Lec B. The course will explore the history of Asian Americans through the role of militarism with a focus on the twentieth century. Topics of discussion will include U.S./Asia relations and U.S. interests in the Pacific region. We also will examine the impact of these issues on politics, culture, and the economy. Requirements will include a five-page paper, a midterm exam, a final exam, a small group project, and regular class participation.

Same as AsianAm 111, Lec A. This course will explore the history of Asian Americans and work from the nineteenth century to the present. Topics of discussion will include migration, colonialism, family, social organization, work culture, and activism. Requirements will include a five-page paper, a midterm exam, a final exam, a small group project, and regular class participation.

Please contact Professor Tinsman (hetinsma@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

The sixteenth-century encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas were riddled with violence and miscommunication as well as negotiation and opportunity. In the first moments of early globalization, Iberians and native Americans defined and defied each other’s gender and racial expectations – to shape past and present identities of Latin Americans.

This course examines the role of sex, gender, ethnicity, and race in the imagination of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the Americas. In turn, the class asks students to investigate how indigenous societies (the Incas in the Andes, the Nahuas in Mexico, the Maya in Central America) experienced European conquest from the household to the market place and from the battle field to the bedroom.

Throughout the quarter, students will explore questions such as: How did new colonial laws adapt to indigenous understandings of property and community? Did Catholic evangelization completely silence native beliefs? How did competing ideas of masculinity inform the acts of conquest and resistance throughout Latin America? How did gendered hierarchies as well as new racial categories create the clashes of conquest throughout the Americas?

Grades will be evaluated based on student participation, midterm and final exams, and two short papers. For History majors, this course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement.

Latin America encompasses a vast region of diverse cultures, economies, and political actors. This course is designed to introduce students to the complexities of the region—its commonalities as well as its distinctiveness. We will examine Latin American history thematically with an emphasis on how history helps to understand and explain contemporary issues. Specifically, we will start with the colonial roots of Latin America and then proceed to investigate topics such as the environment, urbanization, social upheaval, economic development, and human rights. We will discuss these issues in terms of class, gender, and race. The course will reveal how choices made in the past continue to have repercussions today—a situation especially relevant in an age of increased globalization. Students are expected to attend lectures, attend discussion sections, and read all assigned materials. The lectures and assigned readings will be supplemented with videos.

This course will focus on recurring patterns in Western (and particularly American) writings about and visual representations of Chinese culture, society and politics from the mid-1800s to the present. Readings will include selections from memoirs, travel writings and reportage and a survey of Chinese history. Some attention will also be paid to what Chinese travelers have thought about the United States in various eras. Lectures will be supplemented by occasional showings of scenes from feature films and documentaries, and by in-class discussions in which students analyze the readings, looking in part at how contemporary American ideas about China and press coverage of current events such as the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games continue to be shaped by the often romanticized or demonizing presentations of the country that proliferated during earlier periods of U.S. history.

History 171D surveys the development of Chinese civilization from high antiquity through the eighteenth century. Lectures will focus on political, intellectual, economic, and socio-cultural changes. They will be organized chronologically, but emphasize certain important topics and large patterns in traditional Chinese history, including the emergence of a distinctive form of bureaucratic absolutism, the development of Confucian ideology and other classical age philosophies, the introduction and spread of Buddhism, the evolution of a hierarchical but fluid social structure, the great commercial booms in the tenth and sixteenth centuries, the growth of autocracy in the later imperial era, the rise of neo-Confucian orthodoxy, civil service examination culture and the rise of the gentry, the elaboration of the Confucian gender system, the development of folk religion, and the interaction between elite and popular cultures.

Please contact the History Department Undergraduate Program Coordinator (llesher@uci.edu) for course information.

This course is a survey of modern Christian thought. Every ancient religion was affected by the social, cultural, and intellectual changes of the modern period. The course shows how modernity and Christian thought interacted on several areas of interest: on Protestant and Catholic thinking, on liberal theology, on atheism, on morality, on biblical scholarship, on politics, on women, on science, on non-Christian religions, etc. This is an academic study, not a confessional, spiritual, or devotional study. The course is not committed to any particular version of Christianity (of which there are thousands) or to any particular orthodoxy. The instructor is not preaching or attempting to convert anyone to (or from) anything. Be that as it may, the academic study of religion is sometimes controversial to a few students. Students of all Christian denominations, students of non-Christian religions, and students without religious affiliation have all performed well in this course in the past. There will be lectures and regular small-group and full-class discussions. There are four required books and writing assignments for each book. Midterm and final essay exams.

Many popular and academic narratives of European history insist that the democratic forms of government and the modernist discourse of political legitimacy that predominate in the “Western world” may be traced to the contributions of the polis of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Accordingly, such versions of the history of modern democratic institutions assert a genealogy of political forms, theories and processes that originates with the philosophers and artists of Athens and culminates with the early twenty-first century polling place and voting machine. This history of modern political practice is complicated, however, when we look closely at the view of democracy taken by those groups and individuals who themselves observed the birth, growth and maturation of democracy in classical Athens, and particularly those intellectuals, philosophers and artists whose works are most closely associated with the “cultural character” of fifth- and fourth-century Athens. Indeed, many of the most potent minds of classical Athens were bitter opponents of democracy and its organizing principles and institutions. From Plato to the tragedians to Thucydides and the “Old Oligarch,” those Athenian intellectuals who left to posterity a specifically Athenian cultural patrimony were almost uniformly democracy’s harshest critics. In this course, we will examine their critiques of democracy as it evolved in classical Athens, and we will read a selection of the most important recent research on democracy in Athens, including that of Morgens Hansen and Josiah Ober.

As the old European saying goes, “we are what we eat.” “Food and sex represent human nature,” said a Chinese sage more than two thousand ago. Food can help us better understand our society, our communities and ourselves. Since Freud, our understanding of sexuality has significantly advance, but we still have a long way to go before we fully appreciate the importance of food. Food is an interdisciplinary topic, which can be studied in different fields, including history, anthropology, sociology, folklore as well as health and biological sciences. This course is focused on the period since the early twentieth century. Topics include the following: food as a symbol of national and individual identity; cultural authenticity; gender; perceptions/representations of food in the public sphere; food activities in the private sphere; cookbooks as cultural narratives; the importance of “place” for understanding consumption patterns. Video and gastronomical materials will also be used in this class. This seminar is designed to help students develop research, writing as well as oral communications skills. We will also explore methodological issues, especially the question of how to use both traditional and non-traditional materials to do historical research.

Please contact Professor Farmer (sfarmer@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.

This class is part 1 of a 2 quarter seminar on African American chattel slavery in the United States. Students will be introduced to topics in US slavery through the memories, words, artistic representations, and thoughts of former bondpeople. This course will also include discussion of some fictional works on the enslaved experience. Designed as a research seminar, students will develop crucial skills that will be necessary as they proceed as History major or minors.

For more advanced students, this course provides an opportunity to develop in depth research on a given topic. Students will be expected to produce a research proposal at the end of the quarter outlining the larger research project they will produce in History 192W during Winter quarter.

Men, women, and children as well as free Atlantic Africans were able to survive the European-sponsored transatlantic slave trade because they were able to build Diaspora communities, to transform Diaspora identities, and to create Diaspora kin. With a focus on Latin America and Atlantic Africa, this class will ask three questions: How did Atlantic Africans and their descendants -- enslaved and free, young and old, women and men --survive the transatlantic slave trade and transform previous identities and communities to new ones? What were the racial ideologies within the systems of slavery? How did Atlantic Africans and their descendants create friendship circles and kinship affinities to adapt and to resist the many forms of slavery and discrimination in free societies? The course is designed to prepare students to write a research paper in the winter quarter. Written assignments will include identifying the structures of historical arguments including the historical thesis and use of evidence from primary sources as well as a research proposal on a chosen topic.

Please contact Professor James (wjames@uci.edu) for more information regarding this course.