2012-2013 University Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2012-2013 University Catalog archived

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HIST 295 - Seminar: Topics in History


FDR: FDR designation varies with topic.
Credits: 3 in fall or winter; 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.



A seminar offered from time to time depending on student interest and staff availability, in a selected topic or problem in history. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Spring 2013 topics:

HIST 295-01: World Travellers before 1500 (4). This course examines travel narratives written by individuals who crossed continental and cultural divides well before the age of globalization. We pay particular attention to the ways that these travelers sought to understand the strange people and places they visited, how they wrote “others,” and how, in the process, they went about clarifying their own cultural and individual identities. In other words, this is a class about global encounters and shifting perspectives. We also consider ancient, medieval, and Renaissance conceptions of the world and their various attempts to map it. Readings include Herodotus, Julius Caesar, Ibn-Battuta, Marco Polo, Mission to Asia, Columbus, and Amerigo Vespucci. (HU) Policelli. 

HIST 295-02: Place and Race: Euro-exceptionalism in Late-Modern Science (4). Notions of Eurocentricity and Caucasian supremacy received significant scientific input during the period 1750-1950. The involvement of science in the construction of Euro-exceptionalism are comprehensively explored, in particular the role played by Humboldtian geography which used distribution maps in a way that underpinned Eurocentric and imperialistic perceptions of the world. Darwinian evolutionary anthropology added the taxonomic dimension of “low” and “high”, “inferior” and “superior”. The essence of this course is to explore the role of science and scientific leaders played in these discredited constructs and to highlight the work of rare and all too poorly known anti-racist and egalitarian scientists. (HU) Rupke.

HIST 295-03: Winning World War II: U.S. and Allied Grand Strategies, 1940-1945 (4). The United States fought World War II as part of a coalition, one of the most successful wartime coalitions in history. This seminar explores how and why it did so, and why the Allied effort was so successful. Emphasis is placed on U.S. strategic planning, its relationship to U.S. foreign policies, the ensuing conflicts between U.S. strategies and policies and those desired by its British and Soviet allies, and the ways in which these conflicts were resolved by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. As such, it also focuses on civil-military relations and Allied diplomacy during the war, as well as how and why the alliance collapsed after victory had been achieved. Readings include key primary and secondary sources.(HU) Stoler. (mark.stoler@UVM.EDU or stolerm@wlu.edu)

Winter 2013 topics:

HIST 295-02: Seminar: Medieval and Renaissance Intellectual History (3). Does history shape radical thinking or does radical thinking shape history? This course explores these and other questions that guide the field of intellectual history by focusing on a period in which traditional and innovative paradigms both collided and coexisted with creative and important results. We pay particular attention to the historical experiences of philosophical writers, how their experiences helped to shape their ideas, and how their ideas helped to shape historical developments. Readings include Abelard, Aquinas, Ockham, Italian humanists, Machiavelli, Bacon, Newton, and Descartes. (HU) Policelli.

HIST 295-03: Seminar: The Scientist as National Hero (3). This seminar explores the place of science and its practitioners in Western society from the time of the Victorian professionalization of science until today, and focus on the formation of a 20th-century elite of Nobel Laureates and their role in national politics as well as international affairs. The course begins by discussing issues of historiography, paying special attention to scientific biography and metabiography. Approaches are highlighted that “locate” science by looking at it as an embodied phenomenon, not just as a set of ideas and theories. We therefore deal with the practitioners of science, the scientists, their institutions, their image in society and their role in contributing to politics and the public good. How/why have some scientists gained extraordinary leadership status in our culture; how/why have some become national heroes, a few even international ones? Can scientists provide the moral and political leadership to deal with the challenges in society that their very successes have created? (HU) Rupke.

HIST 295-04: Seminar: Science & Religion in Historical Perspective (3). The encounter of science and Christian belief in the Western tradition from the 18th-century Enlightenment to the present day is the focal point of our lectures, essays, and discussions. We do not interpret this encounter as warfare (we do in fact deconstruct the warfare thesis) but instead as several parallel discourses only one of which is to be understood as conflict. We consider a number of thematic topics, ranging from early-modern physico-theology to current doomsday science. Moreover, in order to anchor these general issues in concrete circumstances of time and place, we add a biographical approach and explore the science & religion question in the context of the lives and careers of single eminent scientists. (HU) Rupke.

HIST 295 05: Seminar: Slavery in the Americas (3). An examination of slavery, abolition movements and emancipation in North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Emphasis is on the use of primary sources and class discussion of assigned readings. If you take this topic as 295 you cannot repeat it as HIST 366. (HU) DeLaney.

Fall 2012 topics:

HIST 295-01: Doomsday Science Then and Now (3). In recent years, scientific doomsday literature has surged, along with popular publications of a similar kind. The threat of major impacts by comets or asteroids, and indications of climate change, global warming and sea level rise have deepened anxiety about a possible end to civilization-as-we-know-it. This increase in doomsday concern, in part founded on new scientific observations and insights, also receives input from politics and religion as well as from its historical place in the discourse of human destiny. A preoccupation with global catastrophes, past and future, and related to the study of contemporary local and regional floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like, has a long history in Western culture. Bringing that history to bear on the current concerns may deepen our understanding of the forces that drive the doomsday discussions in today’ society. This course looks at doomsday science and scientists from the past two and a half centuries, examining late-modern theories of global catastrophe, and explores why, in the course of the twentieth century, neo-catastrophism has given renewed legitimacy to fears of “our final hour.” (HU) Rupke.

HIST 295-02: The Intellectual History of Black Civil Rights from W. E. B. Du Bois to Barack Obama (3). This course focuses on the major proponents of African-American Civil Rights and the rationale for racial equality. Special attention is given to W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Charles Hamilton Houston, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama. (HU) DeLaney.

HIST 295-03: Seminar: Darwin and his Critics: the History of Evolutionary Biology (3). The theory of organic evolution is widely considered one of the greatest discoveries of modern science, impacting science and society alike. By and large, the theory has been identified with Darwin and his famous On the Origin of Species. Yet, to what extent is Darwinian theory a cultural construct rather than a factual discovery? In opposition to orthodox Darwinians, such as Ernst Mayr and Richard Dawkins, there have been many critics, ranging from intelligent design advocates in the Anglo-American world to structuralist evolutionary thinkers in the Germanic world, the latter often allied to liberal Christianity. (HU) Rupke.

 





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