History

Cultural Perspectives
Russia from Medieval Times to the Eve of Revolution Russia was born at the margins of the Western world, and has been a site of conflict between Europe and Asia for more than 1,000 years. Christianized by Byzantium, conquered by the Mongols, and forcibly Westernized by Peter the Great, it evolved a unique civilization viewed both as an exotic, primitive cousin of the West, and as its most threatening enemy. Nevertheless, Russia’s rise to great power status, the stunning flowering of its secular culture, and the resistance of its peoples to a crushing autocratic state compel respect and admiration. This course explores Russia’s complex historical development and rich cultural heritage from their 9th-century beginnings to the early 20th century, when an anachronistic imperial state stood on the eve of the revolutions that would destroy it. Course materials raise questions about our understandings of individual, sexual, and social liberation, the limits of political power, and the prospects for cross-cultural understanding. As is evidenced in the agonized interrogation of Russia’s “historical mission” by her Westernized elite, Russia’s placement at the point where the boundary between “East” and “West” has been most permeable provides ample ground for reflection on the nature of both. Among the texts analyzed are writings by cultural and political figures such as Bakunin, Dostoevsky, and Gogol; works of popular culture; and classic Soviet cinematic representations of the Russian past, such as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Andre Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.

Cultural Perspectives
Russia in the 20th Century and Beyond How did the “Workers’ Paradise” promised by Bolsheviks in the 1920s metamorphose into the “Evil Empire” demonized by President Reagan in the 1980s? Do Marxist revolutions inevitably fail? Did Russia’s authoritarian political culture assure that her history would take the murderous turn it did under Stalin? What can the utopian experiments of dissident Russian cultural radicals teach us about gender equality and individual identity? Does President Putin’s November, 2004, announcement of the development of a new generation of nuclear weaponry signal the resumption of the arms race? This course searches 20th- and early 21stcentury Russian history for answers to these questions, as we seek to understand a world where apprehension about a putative “international communist conspiracy” has been replaced by fears of an international terrorism that seems to threaten all of the former antagonists of the Cold War. Readings include contrasting scholarly interpretations of controversial events, and primary sources such as tracts by Bolshevik revolutionaries; Zamiatin’s dystopian novel We; Bulgakov’s anti-Stalinist fable The Master and Margarita; and E. Ginzburg’s memoir about her life in the Gulag. Also analyzed will be classic films such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and Kuleshov’s good-natured satire of American stereotypes of Russia, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.

Cultural Perspectives
Women in Western Civilization: Halos, Harlots, and Heroines If there are goddesses in the Heavens, are women goddesses on earth? How did medieval queens with power in their own right turn into mere wives of the king by the 19th century? What was the fate of Benedetta Carlini, “the Lesbian nun” of Renaissance Italy? How did scientists overlook the ovum when exploring the mysteries of conception during the Scientific Revolution? Why was nobody shouting “Liberty, Equality, and Sorority,” during the French Revolution? How did “feminism” lose its connotation of “effeminate” and become the descriptor for the varied political movements which seek to liberate women? What ideology offers more to females: liberalism or socialism? This course does not promise definitive answers to these questions, but it does offer an exploration of the fortunes of women in European and American history from the medieval period to our current “postfeminist” era that affirms the centrality of their contributions, and enriches our understanding of the experiences of both genders in the past and present.

The Tricks We Play on the Dead: Making History in the 21st Century Can one person “change the course of history,” or are we all merely characters in a grand historical script authored by forces beyond our control? What is more important to learn about the past: the ways that people made love, or the ways that they fought wars? What might future historians conclude about America from this modern day newspaper headline: “Wall Street buoyed by increased rate of joblessness” (The Berkshire Eagle, 6/3/00)? Voltaire’s irreverent definition of history as “the tricks we play on the dead” calls attention to the ways that we, not people in the past, make history, writing their stories to suit our current needs. Our task, then, is to produce a history that informs our understanding of the present while doing justice to the lives of our forebears. This course begins with a brief outline of human experiences from the Paleolithic era to the early 21st century, which is then questioned and elaborated through consideration of a series of issues important for the study of World History on a macro and micro level (e.g., gender relations and sexuality, industrialization, peaceful and hostile cross-cultural encounters, etc.). Students weigh evidence, enter into debates with scholars, and write several pieces of original historical analysis. In their study of specific problems, students also consider the “big questions” that historical investigation can illuminate: Does human nature change over time? How can human action effect change? How can we appreciate rather than fear the differing ways humans cope with the challenges of their day? Where do we turn for practical knowledge and ethical grounding in our own era when it seems that rapid obsolescence is the only sure thing?

Atlantic Slavery: History, Narrative, and Memory Dominant narratives of American history tell of slavery’s demise in 1865 and freedom’s tortured though eventual triumph. Yet the mutually constituted categories of blackness and slavery over 400 years ago suggest an altogether different narrative. So too does the present: the grossly disproportionate rates of black incarceration in U.S. prisons, the near-stable link between blackness and poverty, the outrageous underdevelopment of black Africa in comparison to the industrialized North, and the existence of over 27 million enslaved people today. In short, the simple fact of white overprivilege and concomitant black disadvantage which exists on a global scale is powerful evidence against the progressive narrative of slavery in America. How can we move beyond facile narratives of slavery and freedom to imagine new ways to think about the past’s claims on the present? This course takes as its central topic the rise of Atlantic African capitalist slavery, its life in narratives, and its continuing life in contemporary memory. By examining the links between the enslaved past and present, we will investigate the ways in which the “memory” of slavery still weighs upon the present to shape our lives. The course will be broken into four sections, each constituted by a pair of narratives, one historical and one contemporary: the African slave trade that brought bodies into servitude; the middle passage which transmuted those bodies into legal property; new world slavery which imparted racial dominance and resistance in the era of European empire; and African- American slavery which provided the legal foundations for white domination and freedom in the United States and the world. By examining how whites and enslaved peoples narrated and lived slavery in the past, as well as how whites and blacks remember and live slavery today, our hope is to acknowledge the complex and undying claims the past has on the present. Prerequisite for 300 level: Sophomore standing and two courses in either African-American Studies, History, Anthropology, or Sociology, or permission of the instructor.

Cultural Perspectives
History of Modern Latin America Conducted in English and intended to complement Intercultural Studies 312 CP, which deals with the study of Latin American social, political, economic, and cultural perspectives, this course covers the history of modern Latin America. Special attention will be focused on several specific periods of Latin American history: the colonial past; the wars of independence and their attendant crises; the emergence of a neoclassical order; the effects of the two world wars; the revolutionary wars of the 70s and 80s; the rise of new democracies. We will also explore the relations of certain Latin American countries with Europe and with the United States. An important goal of the course will be to gain an understanding of the historical processes which have contributed to the formation of modern Latin America.

Colonialism, Capitalism, and Slavery We can understand the story of American history as a series of discrete conflicts: between a strong centralized government and local sovereignty; between a large-scale, centralized capitalist economy and local economic systems and producers; and between a system of work largely divorced from the home lives of the workers and a system where the two are integrated. By the end of the American Civil War the balance of power in these conflicts had been tipped to one side or the other. But they were not (and are not) complete. How and why has the nation evolved from small, localized political and economic communities to a nation dominated by a centralized, bureaucratic state that fosters corporate capitalism on a national scale? How complete was that revolution in 1865? How complete is it today? This course is the first of a two-part critical analysis of these developments in American history. It will analyze these conflicts from the perspective of four related and contested narratives. We will follow the story of empire in North America: the conflicts over the growth and centralization of American state power. We will analyze the story of capitalism: the battles over the complementary growth and centralization of the American economy. We will assess these two narratives on the ground, by following the story of the household: looking at how ordinary men and women understood, contributed, and struggled against the changes occurring around them and how they affected work, the family, leisure, and reproduction. Finally, we will trace the story of ideas: how changing understandings of race, gender, and citizenship shaped American history to the Civil War.

American Revolutions Part II: 1865 to Present This course is one of two critical explorations of the history of the United States. We follow four contested and complementary narratives. First we will analyze the contested growth of corporate capitalism, examining how workers, employers, and their families helped bring about a period of rapid industrialization in the late 19th century and the globalization of capital in the 20th century. We will track the growth and limits of state power from the bureaucratic revolution during the late 19th and early 20th century, through the establishment of the welfare state during the Great Depression, the growth of the military state during the Cold War, and analyze the manifestations of these contested legacies in contemporary politics. The course will not lose sight of the role played by ordinary individuals in 19th–20th century America. Investigating their history from the perspective of the household, we will see how different citizens— including but not limited to racialized groups, women, and other marginalized groups—understood, responded to, and helped shape broader developments. Finally, we will examine the cultural contexts of the late 19th and 20th century to uncover the role that ideas about race, gender, and citizenship played in this history.

Where is the West: Europe From Ancient Times to Present How did the cultural and economic backwater that was Europe in late antiquity come to constitute the core of a “western civilization” that would dominate the rest of the world by the end of the 19th century? How did classical Athens, Renaissance Italy, and Revolutionary France come to signify progress in human liberation, if women were excluded from progressive developments in all three? Were the Crusades early examples of western imperialism? How were the bloody religious wars of the 16th–17th centuries linked to the rise of capitalism, democracy, and tolerance of dissent? What do the contemporary welfare states of the West have in common with the “well-ordered police states” of the Enlightened Despots? Do the French and Russian Revolutions demonstrate that all such attempts to refashion polity, society, and economy are doomed to end in terror and dictatorship? Was the Nazi Holocaust an aberration in the history of the West, or one of its quintessential expressions? How is it that Eastern Europe ceased to be part of the West after World War II, while Japan was welcomed into it? These are among the questions that will be considered in this exploration of classic and contemporary debates about the nature and historical significance of Europe from the 5th century BC to the present. Against the backdrop of a brief survey of European history, students will analyze primary texts and contrasting scholarly treatments of a series of historical issues crucial for understanding our contemporary world, the place of Europe within it, and the contested nature of terms such as “western civilization” or “the West.”

The United States and the World: Understanding American Imperialism In the two centuries preceding the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States exerted its power on the global stage. This course will explore the history of U.S. imperialism—the nation’s foreign policy and its actions abroad—by 1) placing the current “War on Terror” in a longer history of U.S. actions abroad; 2) investigating issues of race, class, and gender in U.S. foreign policy; 3) examining the role private enterprise has played in the nation’s foreign policy; and 4) analyzing the respective roles of the center and periphery in the advance and retreat of U.S. global power. After a detailed consideration of the history of imperialism in the 19th century, the course will examine past attempts at “exporting democracy” in the developing or third world, especially in Latin America and Africa. The course will then investigate the historical foundations of the ideologies that drove United States’ aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere. Finally, the course will view this history from the perspective of those in other countries by analyzing antagonism toward U.S. actions throughout the world.

Nature’s Nation: American Environmental History Americans have a peculiar relationship to the world around them. They work, play, shape, use, and invest in the environment at the same time they draw, photograph, and write about “Nature.” Every time a person steps foot out of the front door, he or she understands the outside world and all those activities in it, in unique and individual ways. The timber company executive has a different view of nature than the loggers who cut the trees; the advertising firm that prints the camping gear catalogue thinks about wilderness differently than the people who hike, bike, and camp in it. Midwestern farmers, New York apartment dwellers, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jackson Hole ski bums all have different perceptions about American nature, and those individual perceptions help shape the different ways they interact with the nonhuman world. This course examines how Americans have perceived nature and how those perceptions have shaped the nation’s history, both natural and social. We will look at four distinct but related themes, beginning with how Americans have defined nature in literature, art, and popular culture. What do Americans identify as natural? What are its characteristics? Next, we will examine what happens when Americans have put visions of nature into practice. What happens when citizens or the state designate a space as natural or rural? How have Americans created so-called wilderness areas and at what cost? The course will also look at what American culture labels “civilization”: cities, suburbs, and other supposedly human environments. Who is allowed in? Who is excluded and why? Finally, we will look at the relationship between American history and the biological world: how and why have Americans manipulated plants and animals over time? Have plants and animals manipulated humans? In focusing on the cultural and material constructions of nature students will not lose sight of the larger social history of American natural spaces. Who has labored in nature? How do racial and gender hierarchies help to define the American natural environment? How have ordinary Americans understood the natural landscape?

Created Equal?: Power, Resistance, and Culture in the United States, 1865-1960 Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that in history, it is not what is done to people that is important, but rather what people do with what is done to them. What did freedom and citizenship mean to newly emancipated slaves? How did war and conflict shape American identity? How did different immigrant groups survive in America’s dynamic capitalist economy? What was the meaning of leisure and recreation for wage workers? How did average Americans understand the new sex symbols of the silver screen? Following Sartre, we will answer these questions and others like them by tracing the lives and struggles of ordinary individuals and the ways they understood and remade the world around them. We will examine how individuals and groups “on the ground” both resisted and helped create racial, gendered, and class-based hierarchies and systems of power. Through monographs, articles, and book chapters, as well as primary sources, we will analyze four competing and complementary narratives: class and the contested politics of economic production; the social history of race and racism; changing systems of gender and sexuality; and the curious evolution of ideas and ideals of citizenship and nationalism. We will also look at how mass culture—print media, movies, radio, and television—helped shape the lives of Americans and how different Americans consumed and remade those cultural forms for their own ends. In short, we will tell the story of how ordinary individuals lived, worked, played, loved, bought, and fought and how those actions shaped the larger currents of American history and society.

See America First!: Tourism, Culture and History This course considers the role of tourism in American society and culture. We will investigate four themes: first we will look specifically at the relationship between historical memory and tourist sites; second, we will inquire into how tourism has shaped racial and gendered identities; third, we will investigate the social implications of the tourist industry; and finally, we will examine what drives America’s tourist desires, retreat and escape, physical and spiritual renewal, historical celebration and commemoration, and multicultural exoticism. To “get away” Americans have gone to seaside and mountain resorts, national parks, natural springs, religious retreats, amusement parks, battlefields, museums, historic sites, gambling and vice destinations, and urban entertainment districts. We will read about and visit numerous tourist destinations, including many sites in Berkshire County, to approach a critical understanding of the intersection of tourism and American life.

The Great Outdoors: History & Culture of Outdoor Recreation This course critically analyzes the nature (pun intended) of outdoor recreation in the United States. For many Americans, “nature” has shifted from a place of work, a wilderness to be civilized, to a place of leisure, a wilderness to be played in. Some celebrate this transformation as a revolution in environmental ethics: instead of seeing nature as a possible farm site, logging camp, or pit mine, now some Americans supposedly appreciate nature for its own intrinsic value. Others criticize this shift as just another commercial mode of seeing the nonhuman world. Consequently outdoor recreation has initiated a host of environmental and social problems. This course examines these conflicting perspectives by looking at the ways Americans have skied down, camped in, hiked through, climbed up, surfed in, and generally recreated in the North American “out of doors.” We will examine 1) the natural and social landscapes of outdoor recreation, 2) the cultural themes and representations associated with “the great outdoors” 3) the racial, gender, and class dimensions of outdoor recreation, as well as 4) the economic relationships created by the rise of this new industry. In addition to reading scholars’ writings on outdoor recreation, we will examine the catalogues, stores, and commercials that sell equipment; television shows and movies that celebrate wilderness recreation; and clubs and organizations that sponsor and have sponsored outdoor activity. Most important, we will visit and examine recreational landscapes themselves to make our own arguments about how outdoor recreation has changed our understanding of nature and society.

A Place for Stories: Myth, History, and the American West What is “the West”? Scholars debate terms such as frontier, borderland, internal colony, or middle ground, while in the realm of popular culture Americans have even more contentious debates over what constitutes the American West and its history. Indeed, it seems that in Western history, myths and material reality have gone hand in hand in shaping the history of the region. This course is a survey of the history and culture of the region Americans labeled “the West.” We will examine three major questions that shape the scholarship of the region. First, as a regional history, we will investigate what constitutes a region, and what benefit, if any, a regional focus gives us as historians. What forces make a region cohere? Does “the West” have a common or contested sense of place and regional identity? As a peripheral space, what is its relationship to political and economic centers of power? Second, because “the West” occupies such an important place within the realm of American myth, we will examine how cultural perceptions of the region has shaped its history. How has the federal government and capitalism understood the region? How have Western residents perceived their own region? What role has the “imagined West” played in popular culture— art, photography, dime novels, movies, and television? Finally, we will look at the West as a space of racial, ethnic, and intercultural contact, conflict, and compromise. Geographies of empire and labor created enclaves of Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics. The legacy of contact and conquest shapes the West to this day.

The Wages of Whiteness: Race, Power & Privilege in the United States This course is most fundamentally about power and the ways in which whiteness has come to be synonymous with superiority and privilege while simultaneously nonwhite racial identities are identified with inferiority and powerlessness. Nevertheless, whiteness, as with other racial categories, has a contested history inseparable from other racial concepts. Historian George Lipsitz writes that “whiteness,” while ubiquitous is difficult to acknowledge because it is “hidden in plain sight,” too easily taken for granted as a normative, or “race-less” racial category. This course seeks to reveal how even the most mundane experiences seemingly devoid of racial meaning are nonetheless dependent upon racialized notions of whiteness, privilege, and power. The course begins with the facts that white and minority “races” are neither self-evident nor historically stable, and that white and minority races exist only in relation to each other. In other words, this course will examine the social construction of race as a relational category: the creation and contestation of a “white race” as it exits in relation to racialized “others”—such as African-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Arabs, and Europeans. Course readings will address historiographies and theoretical methodologies aimed at understanding how race, white and nonwhite, has been negotiated and made. The course will examine issues of whiteness and racial construction thematically, including: 1) sites of racial contestation, such as science, law, the state, capitalism, and popular culture; 2) the ways in which notions of race have been built upon corresponding notions of class, gender, and citizenship; 3) the ways in which many white Americans have tried to empty whiteness of racial meaning. In class discussions as well as in several short papers, students will be required to interpret and critically analyze these readings. Prerequisite: Primarily for juniors and seniors with at least one course above introductory level in History, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Political Science, or permission of the instructor.

Hegemony Is Hard Work: Domination/Agency/Resistance What is power? Who has it, who doesn’t, and why? How do the “haves” and the “have-nots” fight, negotiate, and exterminate each other in a given society? This course examines these questions through the lens of “hegemony”—the mass consent given to the established order of society, and the simultaneous opposition that develops to that order—articulated by Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci and subsequent scholars who have built on his work. Gramsci argued that although we may believe the elite hold a privileged, or hegemonic, position in society, their power and domination are often tenuous at best. As post-colonial theorist Stuart Hall once remarked, “hegemonizing is hard work.” We will investigate past societies and the world around us attempting to account for differences in power, authority, prestige, the thickness of people’s wallets and the bareness or bounty of their cupboards. The course will engage literature that has focused on 1) the tools of the dominant group used to maintain authority in society, 2) the agency of the oppressed, and how they have (or have not) been able to shape the world around them to their best interests; and 3) the larger social dialogue or interaction between those supposedly with power and those supposedly without. By examining coercive violence and subtle tools of consent in view of revolutionary violence and subtle forms of protest, we will be better able to understand how scholars have imagined domination, oppression, resistance, and radical change. The class is not intended to offer a “best” theory, or to impose a “progressive narrative” in which the most recent theory is the best. Each set of theories is essentially a set of tools—some are better suited for some tasks than others, some may be suggestive but flawed, others may seem to be useless for the tasks that interest you. But, with each set of theories and concepts we acquire, we have a greater number of tools to draw on in our research and writing. Prerequisite: Sophomore seminar or approval of instructor.

History Tutorial Under these course numbers, juniors and seniors design tutorials to meet their particular interests and programmatic needs. A student should see the prospective tutor to define an area of mutual interest to pursue either individually or in a small group. Examples of tutorials include, but are not limited to, Early Modern Europe (1500-1713), European History (1713-1848), and European History (1848-1950). A student may register for no more than one tutorial in any semester.