Historical Forces

From prehistoric times, human populations have moved across the globe. Driven by environmental, economic, political, and social forces, they have carried with them and have been exposed to new customs, new technologies, and new ideas for structuring societies and interacting with other peoples. They have also brought war, disease, and reduced cultural and biological diversity. Through theoretical and empirical readings about cross-cultural, transnational, and global encounters, this course provides you with the analytical tools to examine the large sweep of such events and movements in the period since 1400 from a variety of perspectives, to understand their causes, their impacts, the counter-currents they engendered, and what we can learn from them. Throughout we pay attention not only to what happened in the past, but to how historians have interpreted these developments.

History as a field of study is based on a set of methods to analyze the past, understand the foundations of the present, and at times anticipate the future. Historical analysis focuses on why changes did or did not occur in particular societies at various times, how these changes unfolded, the motivations of participants, and the influence that the past may have on the present. This course examines the creative responses of historians to the challenges they face in uncovering the past and addressing these issues. Students deal with questions such as what are the boundaries between historical and fictional narratives? How does who writes history affect what they write? If history is written by those in power, as is often stated, what tools does the historian have to write about the people without a history? What possibilities and limitations are inherent in different kinds of historical evidence, whether material objects, written texts, or digitized data sets?

Historical narratives often rely on implicit comparisons between time periods and societies. In this course, students make these comparisons explicit in order to illuminate differences and similarities in the ways societies have responded to political, economic, social, and environmental challenges. Students combine the fundamentals of historical inquiry with methods and perspectives from sociology and anthropology to examine controversial debates about the relative success and failure of different societies and the responses of different societies to similar challenges from the seventeenth century to the present; they also analyze case studies on topics including empire, nationalism, responses to environmental and political crises, and social movements. Along the way, they consider what is gained and what is lost by approaching historical phenomena from a comparative perspective.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past," wrote William Faulkner. The presentness of the past is evident in the controversies that ensue when history is used and misused for public purposes. This course analyzes some of the critical public debates that have occurred over historical issues and over governmental policies enacted in different parts of the world in response to museum exhibits, memorials, the publication of history textbooks, and the making of historical films. It also examines the call for political actions based on a fictitious past as well as the role of historians in opposing such efforts. Students consider questions such as: what constitutes public history and what theoretical issues does it raise? What is the difference between public memory and history? What are the standards and responsibilities of the field? What obligations does the historian have to the living and the dead, and what preparation do historians need in order to be effective in this increasingly important segment of the historical profession?