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	305 Coates Building CB# 3504 UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3504 email: fys@unc.edu phone: (919)843-7773

History

HIST 050 [006G]: John L. Townsend III FYS in History: Books
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA); The World Before 1750 (WB) [GC Western Pre-1700]
Richard Pfaff
As well as reading books, civilized people value them and not infrequently own them. This seminar will explore some of the fascinating aspects of the book--here regarded largely apart form its contents--as an object worth considering in itself. This may involve such activities as scrutinizing incunabula in the Rare Books Collection, making field trips to secondhand bookshops (as well as to the inevitable Amazon.com), talking with preservation officers in Davis Library, comparing different book-versions of the same work, and selecting a book for purchase as a prized possession.

HIST 051 [006J]: Ideology and Revolution in Latin America
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Non-Western History/Cultural Diversity]
John Chasteen
This course explores the problem of revolutionary upheaval in Latin American history. Students will first develop their interpretive skills through intensive reading of the well-
developed English-language historiography concerning the revolutionary wars of the independence era (1810-1825). The wars of independence played out in diverse ways across Latin America. They demonstrated complex intersections of international forces and local conditions, ideologies and economic interests, personal motivations and social grievances-and they spawned many historical debates. In the second part of the course, students will apply their analytical experience to revolutionary episodes of the twentieth century.

HIST 052 [006I]: The Conflicts Over Israel/Palestine
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Sarah Shields
This course will familiarize students with the background of this ongoing conflict while at the same time introducing them to the sources historians use and the way we make arguments based on historical evidence. We will begin with the growth of political Zionism in Europe, continue through early Zionist settlement, the UN partition and resulting war, the history of the conflict through the present, and the various resolutions that have been proposed along the way.

HIST 053 [006I]: Traveling to European Cities: American Writers and Cultural Identities, 1830-1930
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Lloyd Kramer
This course examines the experiences of American writers who traveled and lived in European cities during the era between 1830 and 1930. The course has two goals: (1) to discuss how Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin have influenced modern cultural life and (2) to discuss how American writers have written about their experiences in European cities. We'll consider how travel affects writers' understanding of themselves and their own culture. Readings will include works by Henry James, Mark Twain, Margaret Fuller, Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. We'll develop historical insights into the fascination with famous European cities and the experience of travel.

HIST 054 [006I]: Interpreting the French Revolution, 1789-1815
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Jay Smith
In this course, students wilileam about the dominant interpretations of the French Revolution--one of the foundational events in world history--elaborated over the course of the 20th century, and they will come to appreciate, even as they criticize, the work of those historians who have interpreted the evidence from the French Revolution over the past sixty years. More important, students will have the opportunity to develop and report on their own interpretations of key events in Revolutionary history. The course involves weekly discussion, short papers, occasional presentations, and the writing of a distinctive revolutionary "biography."

HIST 055 [006I]: Can War Be Just?
North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Christopher Browning
The central book around which the course will be focused is Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars. The issues he raises will be studied in light of historical cases taken primarily from W.W. II and the Viet Nam War, but to some extent also taken from W. W. I and more recent conflicts such as the Falkland War, the Gulf War, and events in Bosnia and Kosovo. The latter conflicts, which occurred after Waltzer wrote his book, will be studied at the end of the course to challenge the students to apply Waltzer's ideas in different contexts. We will also look at the historical origins of the "just war tradition," going back to the early medieval period. In short, the course will cover more than one century and will focus on one theme with a clearly defined perspective.

HIST 056 [006I]: World War I: History and Literature
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Christopher Browning
The First World War was a cataclysmic event in European history - the first experience of total war fought by modern, industrialized nations. Participants sought to come to terms with this traumatic experience, both during and after the conflict, through literature (poetry, memoirs, and novels). The seminar will read powerful examples of this literature and discuss them within the context of the history of the war.

HIST 057 [006I]: History and Memory in the Modern South, 1865 to the Present
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Fitz Brundage
This course is organized around reading about and discussing the theme of history, memory and popular culture in the post_Civil War South. The aim of the course is to understand the ways in which various groups of southerners have represented their pasts. In particular, we will explore what different southerners have chosen to remember and forget and to speculate about the reasons why they have done so. During the semester students will critically analyze representations of the past in civic celebrations, literature, historic preservation sites, tourist destinations, music, film and popular culture. The role of ideology, class, gender, and race in shaping collective memory will be emphasized.

HIST 058 [006I]: Born in the USA: Coming of Age in the 1950s and 1960s
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Peter Filene
During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States emerged as a dominant world power at the same time that it experienced unprecedented changes at home. Those who grew up in the midst of these dynamic, dramatic, and difficult times were profoundly shaped by a host of historical forces: the Cold War and Vietnam; the civil rights, feminist, student, and gay liberation movements; the expansion of the modern welfare state; the advent of television and film; new cultural expressions in music and art; the processes of suburbanization and urban transformation; the desegregation of public schools; the explosive rise in college enrollment; and new social formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. By the time of Richard Nixon's Presidency, America was a very different country than it was at the end of World War II.
This seminar will examine what it was like to "come of age" in America during the 1950s and 1960s. Paying careful attention to how the particular experiences of young people operated within larger political, cultural, social, and intellectual contexts, we will interrogate stereotypical images of the "Happy Days" Fifties and "Hippie" Sixties in order to better understand what young Americans were doing, feeling, and thinking-in other words, how they were living-during these two important decades. Along the way, we will read memoirs, essays, poems, manifestos, novels, cultural criticism, and social psychology. We will watch films and television shows. We will listen to music and speeches. We will look at art. We will mine the UNC photographic and newspaper archives. And we will conduct our own oral histories. Through hands-on collaborative learning and diverse writing assignments, we will take a journey through American cultural history while learning something about the youth generation that significantly shaped the world in which you are now coming of age.

HIST 059 [006I]: Remembering the Vietnam War
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Michael Hunt
One of the longest-running conflicts of this century, the Vietnam War echoes in memory. American recollections are on the whole painful, and whether personal or public, they are embedded in a sturdy set of popular national myths and historical misconceptions. Vietnamese people carry deep impressions of a war that pre-dated the arrival of American forces and that deeply scarred their land. This seminar explores the memoirs, oral histories, novels, films, and monuments by which two very distant and very different peoples have sought to make sense of this seminal event in their respective lives.

HIST 060 [006J]: Lives of Eurasian Minorities
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
E. Willis Brooks
The primary intellectual purpose of this course is to increase student understanding of issues related to national minorities, particularly problems related to the formation of national identity, the preservation of minority culture, and interrelationships with other nationalities. The focus is on the national minorities of the former Tsarist/Soviet empire, but a major course assignment will bring students into contact with native informants from that region who now live in the United States. Second, through a combination of common reading, diverse writing assignments, small group discussions and class-faculty supervision of research, this course should lead to a better appreciation of the intellectual challenges of historical study, increased competence in organizing material, improved writing skills, and added confidence in acquired oral and written skills.

HIST 061 [006J]: Southeast Asia in Global Perspective
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Global Issues (GL) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Peter Coclanis
When asked about their image of Southeast Asia, Americans typically begin and end with the war in Vietnam. To be sure, some people recall having heard about atrocities in East Timor or the debt crisis of 1997-1998. Older people occasionally mention Yul Brynner in The King and I, and readers of People Magazine vaguely remember Michael Fay's caning and Imelda Marcos' shoes. By and large, however, Southeast Asia remains terra incognita to most Americans. This is unfortunate because in few areas of the world do contemporary hot-button issue--globalization and cultural diversity to name but two-resonate more richly. Indeed, for much of its history Southeast Asia has been a center of international trade and one of the most diverse and hybridic parts of the world in cultural terms. In this course we shall examine some of the principal themes that have informed Southeast Asian history and continue to shape the area today. In so doing, we shall focus on the relationship between material forces-environmental and economic primarily-and social, political and cultural expressions assoicated with the same.

HIST 062 [006J]: Nations, Borders, and Identities
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Non-Western/Comparative]
Sarah Shields
This seminar will explore the ways people have identified themselves in relation to specific places, nation-states, and foreign "others." It will first introduce students to the ideas of nationalism that emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century, and then consider the struggles of groups during the past century to define themselves collectively. The specific groups we discuss will reflect student interest and contemporary events, but examples include the Kurdish nationalists, Islamist political parties, the Eritrean independence movement, and the Basque separatists. Students will learn how historians do research by doing it, and discover in the process why we find it so thrilling. The final project will be creating electronic teaching materials about one struggle for use in social studies classes.

HIST 063 [006I]: Gender, War and Society
North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Sylvia Hoffert
In this course we will explore the relationship between gender and war. Although I would like to start with a discussion of warrior culture in Western Europe (which might, for example, include having the students perform Lysistrata by Aristophanes), the primary focus of this course with be on the United States, its participation in war, the training of its military, and the role played by civilians in the pursuit of wartime goals. The central questions that we will address are (1) how have all these matters have been gendered and (2) how has their gendered meaning changed over time? Materials used in the course will include those taken from the fields of history, philosophy, literature, film, military science and sociology.

HIST 064 [006G]: Gorbachev, the Collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the Rise of the New Russia
Beyond the North Atlantic (BN); Historical Analysis (HS) [GC Other Western History]
Donald Raleigh
In 1987 Time Magazine named him "Person of the Year." In 1990 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Cold War. How and why did a peasant lad from southern Russia come to rule the world's largest country and empire? Why did his revolution of perestroika, glasnost, and democratization, meant to revitalize the Communist system, result in the collapse of the Soviet empire and its breakup into fifteen successor states? This course will examine the extraordinary individual associated with these developments, and the astonishing transformations that took place while he was in power between 1985 and 1991. It will explore post-Soviet Russia's efforts at negotiating a new set of relations with the rest of the world and how post-Cold-War-Russia continues to shape our own destiny. Then it will consider how the Soviet experience both constrains and enables efforts to establish a democratic political system and a market economy in a world burdened with the threat of terrorism.

HIST 065 [006G]: Reliving Wartime: The Home Front Experience of British Society in the First and Second World Wars
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) [GC Other Western History]
Richard Soloway
Reliving Wartime is an experimental, multimedia course for first-year students designed to explore comparatively the profound experiences of people in Britain during the two world wars of the twentieth century. While the military aspects of these great conflicts are obviously basic to an overall understanding of them, the longer term impact on the culture, values and structure of British society was ultimately more important and more enduring. The major focus of the seminar will therefore be not on military history, but on how - as represented in film, photographs, art, literature, music, personal diaries, memoirs and other documents - men, women and children lived and endured the ten years of unprecedented conflict that transformed their world and in time, ours.

HIST 066: Film and History in Europe and the United States, 1908-1968
Hitorical Analysis (HS); Global Issues (GL); North Atlantic World (NA)
Louise McReynolds
This course will offer explanations about how and why certain films helped to shape the medium itself at the same time that they reflected broader aspects of historical change. Beginning with the development of narrative film in 1908, it will trace change by looking sequentially at those nationally specific genres that had repercussions beyond national borders.Although the delimiting dates are not hard and fast, the course will end in 1968 because the cultural and political revolutions associated with that year had a profound affect on the cinema that followed. A course such as this is especially important in this age of mass media, when people must be familiar with film as well as literature to be considered “culturally literate.” One cannot become literate, however, by simply viewing these films. Critics and audiences alike have been influenced by these movies for a wide variety of reasons, and this course will integrate a series of films into the dominant social, political, and economic environments that produced them. In the process, we will see how the motion picture industry has ignited controversial debates that move well beyond the courtyards of the old movie palaces. Students will also learn how to watch movies, distinguishing between the effects of a film’s formal aesthetics and its social and political contents.

A variety of factors have made certain films historically important. To cite only a few examples, all of which will be discussed in this course: D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” not only generated tremendous social controversy that involved President Woodrow Wilson and legitimated the Ku Klux Klan in America, but it also showed off the master director’s innovative narrative techniques in his use of montage; Sergei Eisenstein transferred the Russian Revolution in form as well as content with his pioneering use of “montage” in “The Battleship Potemkin”; Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” relied on incredible simplicity of camera technique to convey the complexity of postwar Italy; and the replacement of Great Britain’s empire with its welfare state come across in the “kitchen-sink realism” of the series of British “new wave” films beginning in the late 1950s.

Among the themes to be addressed in this course:
1. Movies as an urban, democratic medium (or are they?).
2. Whose movie is it, the director’s? the star’s? the audience’s?
3. To what extent do movies create culture, and to what extent do they reflect it?
4. Elite vs. Popular/Mass Culture.
5. Film as History vs. Film as Historical Source

HIST 067: Life Histories from South Africa
Historical Analysis (HS); Beyond the North Atlantic (BN)
Christopher Lee
This seminar introduces students to the history of twentieth-century South Africa from the perspective of individual life histories.  South Africa went through a number of changes during this period, from industrialization and modernization to the rise and fall of apartheid.  How did individual South Africans experience these changes?  How have they expressed these experiences in their own words?  To answer these questions, students will read memoirs by figures such as Nelson Mandela, as well as writings by lesser-known South Africans.  The seminar concludes with an exploration of the role of personal testimony and history in the construction of post-apartheid South African society, specifically through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

HIST 068 [006I]: American Dreams: Histories of Experience and Explanation, 1620-1900
[Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA) GC Other Western History]
John Sweet
Dreams - frightening, fantastic, forgettable - are as varied, surprising, and ultimately mysterious as the systems of interpretation people have historically developed to make sense of them. In this seminar, through systematic discussion and dialogue, we will explore dreams, visions, and apparitions in American history from the early years of colonial contact to the emergence of modern psychology around 1900. We'll examine theories of dreaming and evidence of actual experiences - from the mystical visions of a Spanish nun to the medical theories of a Revolutionary physician, from the prophecies of Handsome Lake to a popular dream dictionary written by a formerly enslaved fortune teller - by examining basic questions: How do broader cultural systems shape how individual understand themselves and their experiences? How do cultures change over time? Why do different cultural systems coexist at some points and come into conflict at others?

HIST 069 [006G]: Preservation and Persecution: Christian Antisemitism in the Middle Ages
Social and Behavioral Sciences/Other (SS); North Atlantic World The World before 1750 (NA) [GC Pre-1700 Western History]
Brett Whalen
The tragic impact of antisemitism in twentieth-century European history is impossible to deny and raises numberous questions about the origins of antisemitic beliefs. This First Year Seminar will introduce students to the development of Christian antisemitism in Europe from around the first through the fifteenth centuries. The course will provide a basic narrative for points of transition in Christian attitudes toward Judaism, including the fourth-century adoption of Christianity by the Roman state, the crusading movement in the late eleventh century, and the fifteenth-century medieval Jewish expulsions from Spain. It will explore historical factors (political, social, economic) that had an impact on the status of Jewish communities within Christian society. Importantly, it will examine the theoretical underpinnings of how Christian clergy viewed the "Synagogue" and its relationship to the "Church" in historical terms.
This course will also introduce first-year students to the format of discussion-based learning through the group analysis of a common set of readings. these readings will be both primary sources and secondary literature (a distinction that will be explained and reinforced throughout the semester). An emphasis will be placed on the close reading of primary source documents: how to ask appropriate questions and formulate thoughtful conclusions about a given source and its historical context. Finally, we will work on the basic writing skills and styles of argumentation necessary for work as an historian.

HIST 070: The Cotton States Exposition and the New South
Historical Analysis (HS); Communication Intensive (CI); US Diversity (US); North Atlantic World (NA)
Theda Perdue
In 1895 Atlanta hosted the Cotton States Exposition. Like earlier worlds fairs, the Cotton States Exposition encapsulated the values of the organizers and constructed a particular view of the world. Remembered today primarily for the "Atlanta Compromise" speech of Booker T. Washington, the exposition taught other racial lessons. From the Dahomey and Chinese villages on the midway to the Smithsonian's ethnographic exhibits and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, the exposition categorized the world by race and provided a template that white organizers believed should structure race relations both nationally and internationally. This freshman seminar will explore the world of the 1890s South through the lens of the Cotton States Exposition. Students will develop their skills in oral and written communication, discover the resources of UNC libraries and the internet, and experience the North Carolina state fair as a basis for comparison.

HIST 071: Remembering the Holocaust:  Diaries, Memoirs, Testimonies
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA)
Christopher Browning
This course will examine how our images and understanding of the Holocaust have been shaped and transmitted to us through four different forms in which the experience of the victims has been recorded: diaries of victims who did not survive, postwar memoirs of "ordinary" survivors, "classic" novelistic memoirs by preeminent survivor novelists, and testimonies visually recorded by documentary film makers. The focus will not be on a narrative history of the Holocaust as such, though essential background material will be provided for context. Rather the focus will be on the varying experiences of the victims, how they attempted to make sense of and relate what had happened to them, and how their efforts have in turn shaped our understanding of this watershed historical event.

HIST 073: On the Train: Time, Space, and the Modern World
Historical Analysis (HS); North Atlantic World (NA)
Chad Bryant
Long before the first passenger train left Manchester for Liverpool, England in 1830, early railway promoters in Europe and the United States correctly predicted that train travel would affect radical transformations: industrial development, the mobilization of labor, urbanization, a more efficient government and mobile armed forces, and the rise of the tourist industry, to name just a few. But these were not the only changes brought about by the train. Passengers accustomed to traveling by horse and carriage searched for words to describe the new experience of hurtling through space, in a straight line, at more than thirty miles per hour. Reduced travel time meant that distances seemed to shrink. The need for interchangeable train schedules inspired Americans and Europeans to coordinate local times and to establish the time zones that divide up the globe today. The train, in other words, created new ways of seeing, new ways of thinking about time and space, and new ways of conceptualizing an increasingly interconnected and mobile world. Our course will begin with a close reading of one book, Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Looking to the Railway Journey for inspiration, we will then ask and begin to answer our own questions about the effects that this technological innovation had on American and European culture.

HIST/ART/ENG 077 [006K]: Seeing the Past
Humanities & Fine Arts/Visual or Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/Fine Arts]
James Thompson, Lloyd Kramer, Mary Sheriff
This seminar will introduce students to practices of critical analysis that inform academic work in all the core humanistic disciplines: how do we ask analytical questions about texts, artwork, and other cultural artifacts that come down to us from the past or circulate in our own culture? "Seeing the Past" will be taught in conjunction with the Ackland Art Museum's project, "Witnesses to an Age of Transformation," for which the Ackland has received a grant to mount an exhibition, with attendant programs, including this seminar. The exhibition revolves around three unusual paintings in their collection: Amigoni's Venus Disarming Cupid; Francois-Xavier's portrait of Henry Richard Vassall Fox; and Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos, a work of the English romantic school. Each of these paintings presents an array of problems and questions, including attribution, provenance, subject, and iconography. The three faculty members who will teach this seminar represent different disciplines-Mary Sheriff is an eighteenth-century French art historian, Lloyd Kramer is an eighteenth-century French intellectual historian, and James Thompson is an eighteenth-century English literary historian. The central question that "Seeing the Past" asks is this: What do you need to know in order to understand these paintings? What constitutes necessary and accurate information? How do you find it; and how do you evaluate it?

HIST 076: Understanding 1492
Historical Analysis (HS); World before 1750 (WB)
Kathryn Burns
This seminar addresses one of the most challenging topics in American and Latin American history: how to understand what is often called simply “the conquest,” la conquista.  For nineteenth-century historians writing in English and Spanish, it was a relatively clear-cut matter of epic battles and conquistadores.  Spaniards won in a walkover; the “bronze race” suffered tragic defeat. Today, the conquest (or encounter, or invasion) no longer looks this way to historians.  New sources, methods, and approaches have taken the field.  Yet as our perspectives shift, our histories of la conquista still elicit strong feelings.  Why?  What’s at stake in the narration of this charged history?  Whose versions of events tend to dominate?  In this seminar, we will pay close attention to the sources for understanding the past, and to ways of narrating it.  Students will explore the Wilson Library’s remarkable Flatow Collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles, and handle documents from the Manuscript Division’s holdings from colonial Popayán.  Students will be expected to write frequent responses to our sources, participate in class discussions, and craft a final essay on a topic of particular interest.