HIST204

Description

Each semester the course is offered, the content will be based on student interest and faculty expertise. The course is repeatable for credit as long as the content varies; students may take a specific iteration of the course only once. THE TITLE OF THIS COURSE FOR FALL 2025 IS: WOMEN IN PUBLIC (HISTORY) This course will examine women as authors and objects of public history making. How have women preserved the past and why? What stories have they told and how did their choices reflect broader social or political goals? How are the lives of women documented in public history sites?Examining historic sites, memorials, and archives, we will place women in US history while interrogating the histories they fashioned in public and for the public. THE TITLE OF THIS SEMINAR FOR SPRING 2025 IS: WOMEN'S BODIES, WOMEN'S RIGHTS. We often speak of rights in broad and abstract terms - freedom, privacy, equality. Yet we experience rights concretely, even bodily. In this course, we will explore the varied ways rights (or their absence) have defined, constrained, protected, and empowered women's bodies throughout U.S. history, from the colonial period to the recent past. By studying marriage, slavery, immigration, and paid employment as well as health and reproduction through the lens of women's bodies, students will consider American women's changing legal status and the shifting boundaries of their bodies. THE TITLE OF THIS SEMINAR FOR FALL 2024 IS: JEWS IN THE CITY This seminar will explore a central feature of the modern Jewish experience: life in the city. While cities have been important to Jewish life since antiquity, rapid and unprecedented urbanization in the nineteenth century dramatically transformed the lives of Jews around the globe-their built environment, their professions, their politics, their cultural and aesthetic projects, their relationships to questions of sex and gender, their religious practices, and their relations with non-Jews. While this course will offer students the opportunity to investigate the modern Jewish urban experience globally, we will give special attention to perhaps the most famous Jewish city of all: New York.