Undergraduate Course Descriptions
history - 2005
This page last updated: Monday, 11-Apr-2011 12:20:35 PDT
Berkeley History majors may now enroll in summer 103s using Summer Telebears. Students who are interested in History 103 but are non-majors or non-Berkeley students should contact Leah Flanagan at (510) 642-0356 or leahf@berkeley.edu
First 6 Week Summer Session |
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| 100 - Postwar Japan | Barshay | |
| Tu W Th 10-12:30 2320 Tolman | ||
| Updated March 26, 2005 | ||
| This course will consider the history of Japan since the end of World War II, beginning with an exploration of the war itself and its complex legacy to the postwar era. Using the best recent scholarship and a selection of translated novels, essays, and poetry along with film and art, we'll look at the six postwar decades and the transformations of Japanese life that those years have brought. We'll try, finally, to answer the question: has "postwar" itself come to an end?" | ||
| 100 - Britain on Film | Vernon | |
| Tu W Th 2-4:30 20 Wheeler | ||
| This course will explore the history of twentieth century Britain through film -a century that marked its replacement by Amercia as world hegemon and richest nation. In no way a comprehensive history of British film, it will rather focus on films as products of particular historical moments as well as the uses of history in film. It will also explore the place of film in British popular culture and ask what the changing practices of movie-going (who went, how often, to what films, in what sorts of movie theaters, with what sort of conventions of audience behaviour) tells us about British society in the twentieth century. Drawing upon a wide variety of film genres - stretching from Trainspotting to Gosford Park, Nightmail to 7 Up , Bend it Like Beckham to Lawrence of Arabia, James Bond to Gandhi, 39 Steps to Zulu - the course will track Britain's changing relationship to empire, to America and Hollywood, and the politics of class, gender and multi-culturalism. It will ask whether it makes sense to talk of Britain's twentieth century as one of decline and examine how film has registered Britain's economic, social, cultural, and political transformation. | ||
| 112 - Modern South Africa | Kanogo | |
| Tu W Th� 10-12:30 83 Dwinelle | ||
| This course will examine three centuries of South African History that account for the origin and development of the recently dismantled apartheid regime. Our aim is to understand the major historical forces that progressively shaped what became a turbulent socio-economic, political, and racial frontier. We will look at the nature of indigenous African societies in South Africa on the eve of European arrival; initial European settlements and the origins of competition for resources; expansionist trends among Dutch settlers and the responses of African societies; mfecane/difacane and its aftermath; the role of the frontier in shaping race relations; emergence of Afrikanerdom and the creation of Afrikaner republics; competing African/Boer/British nationalisms; corporate mining and its impact on labour migrancy; the Anglo-Boer war and the creation of the Union. The 20th century witnessed the formulation, articulation, and racialization of trade unions, the emergence of increased political mobilization among African, Afrikaner, and Indian populations. The course will examine the complex relationship between key protagonists, and the creation and dismantling of the apartheid apparatus. Course requirements will include a midterm (40%), one review paper (20%), and a final exam (40%). | ||
| 124B - The United States Since 1940 | Agee | |
| Tu W Th 10-12:30 2 Evans | ||
| Updated May 24, 2005 | ||
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There are no formal prerequisites for this course, but all students should understand that this is an advanced course that presumes a survey knowledge of 20th Century U.S. history. Culture, race and gender relations,foreign policy, politics, business, literature, and constitutional issues are among the subjects we will be concerned with. Also, sex. There will two midterms and one final exam, both in class. There will be no take-home writing assignments. Exams will require careful attention to lectures as well as to the required readings. |
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| N131B - Social History of the United States Since the Civil War | Leikin | |
| Tu W Th 1-3:30 2 Evans | ||
| Updated May 24, 2005 | ||
| This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement. | ||
| This course is a survey of U.S. social history since the Civil War. It will focus on the experiences of men and women as they lived through the major structural transformations of a modernizing America. This course will explore the political, ideological and cultural responses of Americans to social change and the rise and fall of the social movements that challenged (and continue to challenge) the limits of American democracy. In addition the readings, lectures and occasional tours of local sites will examine how Americans dealt with issues of class, ethnicity and gender through periods of urban growth, economic depression and war. | ||
| 139A - History of American Labor | Sawislak | |
| Tu W Th 3-6 215 Dwinelle | ||
| This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement. | ||
| How did (and does) the experience of work in a capitalist economic order shape and transform the political and cultural lives of working people in America? This lecture course surveys United States labor and working-class history from the early nineteenth century to the present. Themes and topics include the changing characteristics of work itself; the formation and definition of the "working class"; the economic impact and social experience of mass immigration and migration; unionism, socialism, communism and other forms of working-class organization; and working peoples' evolving relations with their employers and with the state. In addition, this class explores the impact of gender, race, and ethnicity upon the structure of workplaces and the dynamics of working-class families, communities, and cultures. | ||
| 139C - Recent U.S. Social Movements: The Third World | Martin | |
| Tu W Th 10-1230 105 Dwinelle | ||
| Updated May 24, 2005 | ||
| This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement. | ||
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This course, which satisfies the American Cultures requirement, will explore the liberation movements mounted by various peoples of color between 1945 and 1975 as both social movements and cultural movements. In other words, we will look at the formal aims, strategies, organizations, mass activity, and leadership--the social movement--as well as the beliefs, attitudes, values, expressive creations and artistic elements intrinsic to the liberation strugge--the cultural movement, or "movement culture." Our broad goals will be, on one hand, to access the interconnections between social and cultural struggle, and on the other hand, to assess the interconnections among those social and cultural aspects of liberation struggle with the political and economic contexts in which the struggle takes place. More specifically, we will compare and contrast the movement cultures which simultaneously grow out of and influence the post-World War social movements of African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. We want to understand the similarities, differences, and ties among these movement cultures. We also want to examine the crucial impact of these movement cultures on white hegemony in this period. Course requirements will likely consist of a midterm essay (20%); a comprehensive final (30%); a research essay comparing/contrasting some aspect[s] of the movement cultures of at least two of the groups covered (25%); and participation in weekly discussions (25%). |
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8 Week Summer Session |
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| 103B.001 - Mixed Places and Separate Spaces: Topics in the Historical Geography of Modern Europe | Kulke | |
| M W 10-1 2303 Dwinelle | ||
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Central Europe is hard to outline on a map. Where does it begin and end? For this very reason it lends itself well to historical geography, or inquiries about the relationships between people, places, and time. In this seminar we will focus on the twentieth century, an era of drastic change in the physical and human landscape of Central Europe. With novels, films, memoirs, and secondary literature we will discuss topics such as urban-rural interdependencies, racial landscapes, individual and collective understandings of place, and the politics of reconstruction and European integration. Students will twice have the opportunity to explore a particular subject in depth by giving an oral presentation and writing a review essay on that subject. In place of the second review essay, students may submit a thesis (101) prospectus. Requirements will also include active class participation and brief written commentaries on the reading assignments. |
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| 103B.002 - From Masses to Multitudes: Thoughts on the Crowd in European Intellectual History | Peden | |
| Tu Th 3-6 104 Dwinelle | ||
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The history of late modern Europe has been marked by an increasing awareness of the problem of mass politics and crowd behavior. Fears of mob rule are as old as Plato, and the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 offered evidence of the violence that can erupt when a collective body temporarily overcomes legal, physical, and cultural restraints. The twentieth century bore witness to the horrors of totalitarianism and the destructive unity of the sheer size of the mass and the apparent irrationality of the crowd. This seminar will examine how European intellectuals since the late nineteenth century have confronted the problem of collective behavior in modern life. In marked contrast to dominant strands of political science and economics, which seek to elucidate the rational core of collective behavior, the discourse of the crowd usually involves an assumption of irrationality rooted either in animalistic instincts or mystical beliefs. In addition to the metaphorical qualities of crowd inquiry - with the crowd often serving as a stand-in for urban density or society at large - special attention will be paid to how an examination of the collective by our authors tends to involve a confrontation with religion and religious discourse and the assumption of a certain persistence of the "primitive" in modern life. Whether it is Hitler's "magic spell" (Arendt) or the mystical qualities of the "totem" (Freud, Durkheim), most attempts to explain the behavior of the masses involve recourse to religious or mystical variables. Our seminar will take seriously the familiar opposition between religious belief and rational inquiry by questioning how this opposition has developed historically to become a feature of our shared modernity. Due to the constraints of time and the historical approach of our project, we will avoid a textual confrontation with the growing recent literature on mass culture and technology occasioned by the Internet and mass media's ability to connect individuals across vast physical spaces. The recent conglomeration of devotees in St. Peter's Square in Rome reminds us, however, that the crowd as a manifest, physical entity is not solely a thing of the past. History 5 is a pre-requisite for this course so, in addition to the basic narrative of European history, some familiarity with the works of Karl Marx will be assumed. One attractive feature of our seminar will be its exploration of some alternative trends in European intellectual history not usually represented in undergraduate history seminars. In addition to the familiar faces of Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud, we will look at figures representing a variety of perspectives: political theory (T�nnies), social psychology (Le Bon), sociology (Durkheim), philosophy (Bergson), anthropology (Douglas), and literature (Canetti). Requirements include several short papers covering the weekly reading and a visible commitment to productive class discussion. |
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| 103D.001 - United States Urban Culture in the Twentieth Century | Agee | |
| M W 3-6 258 Dwinelle | ||
| Updated June 21, 2005 | ||
| Class meets in 2227 Dwinelle on 6/22. | ||
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This course will explore how Americans defined and experienced urban living during the Age of the City. As the United States transformed from a rural and small-town society into an urban and suburban nation, Americans found that cities facilitated new forms of association and new methods of control. This seminar will examine cultural themes such as masculinity, the built environment, popular entertainment, and the public sphere to explore how city residents exerted and challenged authority in urban America. Over the course of the semester, this seminar will seek to explain the apparent contradictions of urban fragmentation and integration. For instance, we will discuss how ethnic, artistic, sexual, and racial subcultures developed alongside a new, urban mass culture. During other weeks, we will analyze how the rise of black, formal, political power paralleled an increased marginalization of black neighborhoods. Ultimately, this seminar hopes to illuminate how cultural shifts in urban America spurred and reflected changing power relations in America-at-large. Course requirements include weekly readings, one book review, and your choice of a thesis pre-prospectus or a final, in-depth book analysis. The seminar will utilize primary documents, films, and secondary readings, such as Paul Groth�s Living Downtown, George Chauncey�s Gay New York, George Sanchez�s Becoming Mexican American, Thomas Sugrue�s The Origins Of The Urban Crisis, and Mike Davis�s City of Quartz. |
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| 103D.002 - History of the Nature-Nurture Debate | Spiro | |
| MTh 1-4 2303 Dwinelle | ||
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, the prevailing assumption in the United States was that heredity (also called "nature") was the crucial factor determining human behavior and personality (and that the blond-haired, blue-eyed "Nordic race" was therefore the "master race," as it was blessed with inherently superior intellectual capacities). By the middle of the century, the pendulum had swung to the other extreme: the belief that environment (a.k.a. "nurture") was the key determinant of human behavior (and that all people and races were therefore potentially equal, as long as they were raised in similar conditions). But here at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are rapidly returning to the idea that heredity is preponderant (in the past two years alone geneticists claim to have discovered the genetic origins of such traits as shyness, insomnia, obesity, aggression, creativity, addiction, optimism, fear, disgust, homosexuality, and I.Q.). So, which is more important: heredity or environment? Beats me. But it certainly is interesting to observe how the pendulum of public opinion swings back and forth between the two. The aim of this course, therefore, is to trace the mercurial history of the nature-nurture debate in the U.S. in order to reveal its effect on public policy and its influence on the way you and I think about such matters as race, intelligence, poverty, and gender. |
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| 103D.003 - Looking Good and Having Fun in Modern America | Romesburg | |
| Tu Th 3-6 3104 Dwinelle | ||
| Updated June 21, 2005 | ||
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In our contemporary mass-market society, looking good and having fun are two of the major emphases of well-adjusted consumer selfhood and citizenship. From the late nineteenth century, a rapid expansion in both commercialized leisure and the �beauty industry� has transformed Americans� relationships to their own and others� bodies, notions of pleasure and happiness, concepts of personality, and meanings of success. The rise in the twin cultural emphases of attractiveness and amusement also reshaped the American economy and society over the next century. To access such wide-ranging phenomena as bodybuilding, beauty, fashion, nightlife, youth, dating and sex, celebrity, Disneyland, and medical technology, this course will draw upon both interdisciplinary academic scholarship and popular materials such as newspaper accounts, films, music, literature, and sheet music cover art. We will also necessarily grapple with questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, normativity, and authenticity. Using various methodologies of cultural history, we will explore the ways in which such apparently straightforward and self-motivated actions as �looking good� and �having fun� can be understood within larger political, economic, social, and cultural contexts of power, policing, profit, and pleasure. Students with further questions may contact the instructor directly at donromesburg@earthlink.net. |
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| 103D.004 - California | Schneider | |
| Tu Th 3-6 2227 Dwinelle | ||
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"Never before in history has a people been swept away with such terrible swiftness," wrote a traveler to California in 1877 of the Indians of California. But at the beginning of the 21st Century, as the issue of casino gambling claims headlines and the attention of California politicians, Californians realize that such predictions of Indian disappearance were premature. And while California through much of the 20th century was underrepresented in the canon of American Indian History (it possessed few of the elements that tended to attract either scholars of Indian history or Indian policy makers � there were no ratified treaties, no Great Plains-style military campaigns, few federally recognized tribes and fewer reservations) this oversight is all the more glaring as Californians express surprise at the presence of Indian tribes in their �neighborhoods,� or shock at the perceived political clout of those revitalized tribes. The history of California Indians has much to tell us about where Indian land has been and can be located, what it can be and has been used for, what defines �Indian� or �tribe,� and who governs the affairs of an �Indian Country� that is not as far away as earlier generations of Californians had imagined. This course will survey some of the more recent scholarship in the history of native California, with a mind to informing students� broader understanding of American Indian history, as well the histories of the West, American Society, and Colonialism. The course will also consider how Indian History is written � what sources, methods, debates and academic disciplines have defined the field. There will be weekly readings and two papers. |
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| 103D.005 - Early American Frontiers - Trans-Appalachia and Western Expansion (1763-1850) | Mujal | |
| Tu Th 8-11 2303 Dwinelle | ||
| The idea of the West is explored as it first occurred to those individuals and groups who crossed the Appalachian Mountains into new �frontiers� between 1763 and 1848. In this context, moving west included entry into the old northwest, north of the Ohio River, and the old southwest, along the paths of the Mississippi and associated rivers. In these zones of interactions, Indians, Euro-Americans and black settlers were forced to deal with each other and the �other.� In this changing landscape where replication of societal norms was valued, the Industrial revolution played but a minor role. The course will examine and compare several trans-Appalachian frontiers and note where their histories were singular or coalesced and where the frontier phase laid the groundwork for the customs and social institutions yet to come. | ||
Second 6 Week Summer Session |
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| 5 - European History: The Making of the West | Elliott | |
| M Tu W Th F 10-1130 2320 Tolman | CCN: 47405 | |
| This introductory course provides an overview of European history from the Renaissance to the end of the Cold War. Against the broad sweep of the historical narrative � the major events and the leading figures � this course highlights the key breakthroughs and turning-points that made possible the transformation of medieval Europe into the modern West. A central emphasis will be the creative interaction between different aspects of society: political, economic, cultural and philosophical; over and over, developments in one area sparked important changes in another. We will consider selected primary sources which reveal some of the attitudes, values and beliefs of ordinary men and women in the successive historical periods. In particular, the course will include an extensive visual component with artwork serving as primary source material eloquently articulating many of the critical shifts in outlook that occurred in Western society. | ||
| 7B - The United States Since the Civil War | Spiro | |
| M Tu W Th F 10-1130 101 Moffitt | CCN: 47420 | |
| This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement. | ||
| Section times will be determined at the first class meeting. | ||
| This course provides a comprehensive overview of U.S. history from 1865 to the present. The lectures cover the basic political, economic, and diplomatic developments of this fascinating period, while the discussion sections provide a venue for students to delve into and debate the important social and cultural issues of the past 150 years. At the end of the course, students will be familiar with the basic chronology of U.S. history since the Civil War, will understand the more important and interesting controversies that erupted during those years, and will be grateful that by attending class every day in the summer they lessened their risk of contracting skin cancer. | ||
| 12 - The Middle East | Doumani | |
| M Tu W Th F 10-1130 219 Dwinelle | CCN: 47450 | |
| The diverse peoples of Southwest Asia and North Africa have a rich and remarkable history: they produced the earliest centers of agriculture-based civilizations and urban life, gave birth to the world's three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and served as the middlemen of the world economic system during the medieval and early modern periods. During the modern era, this region remained a center for attention but for different reasons: seminal colonial encounters beginning with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, the discovery of oil and its impact on the world economy as well as the archetypal Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Lebanese civil war. More recently, the Middle East became the key theater for US military operations following the profoundly important Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979). Indeed, the nature and future of US global dominance has been shaped by the Gulf War of 1991 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. This course outlines all of these key historical developments from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the present. The first third of the course considers the significance of Islamic civilizations from a world historical perspective. The second third traces the construction of the modern state system from the late Ottoman era through the period of British and French colonial rule. The rest of the course introduces the key individuals, events and underlying forces which have shaped the politics, economics and cultures of the newly independent states of the Middle East. Biographies of "ordinary" people, novels, and films are used to foreground the voices of the inhabitants and to illustrate their attempts to shape the processes that affect their everyday lives. | ||
| 100 - The Goddess and the Knights: Gnostics, Templars, Wiccans, and Other Standbys of Popular Medieval History | Koziol | |
| Tu W Th 2-4:30 259 Dwinelle | CCN: 47495 | |
| This course satisfies the Premodern requirement for the history major. | ||
| Does Da Vinci's Last Supper really show Mary Magdalene on Jesus' right hand? Did Mary and Jesus really have a child who was the ancestor of the Merovingians? Was there an ancient religion of the Goddess? A Priory of Sion? Does the Louvre pyramid really have 666 panes of glass? Is anything true in The Da Vinci Code, or Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Chalice and the Blade? Does it matter? Should we care? | ||
| 100 - Modern United States History Through Film | Berrett | |
| Tu Th 1-5 109 Dwinelle | CCN: 47465 | |
| This class will consider, in the widest sense, the relationship between film and America since 1900. How useful is film, really, as a historical source? How do they tell the truth? How do they mislead or even lie? In pursuit of answers, we will set older and present-day visions of the same era in conversation; we will see what questions they ask of one another, as well as the ways in which they may illuminate the larger cultural concerns of a period. Assignments include a midterm, final, and paper. Films (to be viewed in whole or part) include The Cheat, The Crowd, My Man Godfrey, Sands of Iwo Jima, Flower Drum Song, Cleopatra Jones, Dirty Harry, 9 to 5, and Left Behind II: Tribulation Force; books will include Gerstle, American Crucible; Ross, Movies and American Society; and a course reader. | ||
| 127AC - California | Mujal | |
| T W Th 1130 -2 130 Wheeler | CCN: 47575 | |
| Updated June 21, 2005 | ||
| This course satisfies the American Cultures Requirement. | ||
| For centuries, California has been imagined and experienced in a variety of ways. For Native Americans, the land we call California was part of their fabric of life. For the imperial builders of the Spanish empire, it was both a link to expansive trade and �el �ltimo rinc�n del mundo.� For Mexican ranchers, it was a pastoral land filled with natural abundance and accented with deprivation. Mindful of the effects which the discovery of gold had in the post-1848 era, Carey McWilliams called California �the great exception.� However, to the immigrants who emigrated and continued to arrive in California in the twentieth century, it was a place as real as it was un-real, exceptional as well as unexceptional. In the process, successive waves of people from Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim have been attracted and recruited to assist in making California more that it was. This course traces the development of globalization as a cultural flow and phenomenon, the internationalization of economies, and the transnational character of human migrations. Through an historical and comparative approach, the course explores the migration of specific groups as a means of understanding the economic and cultural interactions between California and the world, including their effects here and abroad. | ||
| C157 - The Renaissance and the Reformation | Dandelet | |
| Tu W Th 12-230 166 Barrows | CCN: 47630 | |
| This course is also listed as Religious Studies C124 | ||
| European history from the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century. Political, social, and economic developments during this transitional period will be examined, together with the rise of Renaissance culture, and the religious upheavals of the sixteenth centuy. | ||
| 158C - Europe 1914 to the Present | Wetzel | |
| Tu W Th 2-4:30 209 Dwinelle | CCN: 47635 | |
| The twentieth century was the most devastating in the history of Europe. This course surveys the major developments that led to the wars and revolutions for which the century is famous. It stresses the supreme importance of the commanding actors on the political stage as the century unfolded--Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Churchill and de Gaulle, Walesa and Thatcher and Gorbachev, and focuses on the differing approaches to European relations taken by American presidents from Wilson to George W. Bush. From start to finish, the course seeks to encourage the view that the events of the twentieth century happened because individual and discoverable people decided things and did them; that greatness in politics can exist; that there are overwhelming personalities in history; and that the activities of the few have been disproportionately important for all. The course begins with the crisis leading up to the outbreak of World War I in July 1914 and ends with the events of the 2nd Gulf War in January 2005. There is a mid-term, a final, and a short paper. | ||