History 600/Hist Sci 555 Seminars

Students interested in this course should contact Professor Cheng via email (cicheng@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course.

War drives the movement and dislocation of people. But while many are forced to flee and escape war in their home countries, they are not always able to find new countries that will take them in. For instance, the United States only allows certain groups to enter as refugees. It also sets a quota to determine how many could be admitted per year. For those who are not admitted as refugees but are nevertheless asylum seekers, they enter the U.S. as undocumented immigrants. Refugee, Asylee, and Undocumented – what purpose do these labels serve and who makes these determinations? This semester, we will examine these questions together. We will focus on three wars – WW II, the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and the Cold War in Central America – to explore the special circumstances that enabled some groups to enter the U.S. as “refugees” and others as “undocumented.”

Additionally, we will examine the lived experiences of the displaced as they are represented in films, memoirs, graphic novels, oral histories, and historical writings. Thus, outside of learning why the federal government created different immigration statuses to distinguish one group from another, we will analyze how these labels shaped where immigrants lived and worked and how their rebuilt their social networks. Ultimately, the goal of this exploration into war and forced displacement is to gain a deeper understanding of U.S. immigration history. Given that immigration has been the touchstone of U.S. political debates, the hope is that this course will help us navigate through the many refugee- and undocumented- related issues that have been raised in our national forums.

Students interested in this course should contact Professor Hirsch via email (fhirsch@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course.

In this course we will explore Soviet history from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 through memoirs, diaries, autobiographical fiction, letters, and other primary sources. The course will examine memoirs written by Soviet citizens, Soviet leaders, and American visitors, with on focus on everyday life during the Stalin era. We will discuss questions of belief, agency, and fear. Most of all, we will investigate the benefits and possible pitfalls of using memoirs, on their own and combined with other kinds of sources, to gain a greater understanding of key historical moments. Students will write weekly reflection papers based on the readings as well as a 12-page research paper based on memoirs and other sources.

Some familiarity with Russian or Soviet history will be helpful for the class but is not required. Everyone interested in reading and thinking about memoirs is welcome.

Students interested in this course should contact Professor McCoy via email (awmccoy@wisc.edu) with: (a.) whether History major or certificate student; (b.) status (junior, senior standing); (c.) GPA; (d.) campus ID number; and (e.) a single sentence stating their interest in the course.

Course Description: Designed for undergraduates and graduate students with some background in U.S. diplomatic history or international relations, the course will probe the dynamics of CIA covert wars through comparative case histories over the past 75 years. By focusing on world regions such as Europe, Latin America, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, the seminar will explore the central role these covert wars played in the Cold War and its aftermath. These clandestine interventions often succeeded brilliantly from a U.S. perspective. But they sometimes left behind ruined battlegrounds and ravaged societies that became veritable black holes of international instability.

After several sessions reviewing the origins of the CIA and its distinctive patterns of clandestine warfare, the seminar will apply a case-study approach to covert wars in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America—including, the anti-Mossadeq coup in Iran, overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, Lumumba’s murder in the Congo, and the protracted war in Afghanistan. Reflecting the significance of Southeast Asia to CIA operations, the seminar will also devote four sessions to this region, including anti-Sukarno operations in Indonesia, anti-communist pacification in the Philippines, counter-guerilla operations in South Vietnam, and the secret war in Laos—arguing that the latter two operations are central to understanding more recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

Through the sum of such content, students should finish the seminar with knowledge about a key facet of U.S. foreign policy and a lifelong capacity for critical analysis of international relations. Beyond such an approach, the course will give students sharpened analytical abilities, refined research tactics, improved oral presentations, and better writing skills.

Grading: In addition to participating in each class, students shall be marked on their presentation of two 15-minute summaries of the week’s topic, and three writing assignments—two short papers for the first and last class, as well as a major essay based on one of the student’s oral presentations about a particular CIA covert operation.

Students interested in this course should email Professor Ratner-Rosenhagen (ratnerrosenh@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course, accompanied by a list of related courses they have taken.

The current trend of book bannings in the U.S. casts in bold relief the long history of bitter contestation over ideas in America. What has always been fundamentally at stake in these intellectual and cultural battles is the fear that certain ideas are “dangerous” or “un-American” or both. Examining which books have been banned, when, why, and by whom allows us to eavesdrop on the past and encounter how Americans have conceptualized and grappled with ideas about race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, politics, technology, the economy, and morality in their particular historical contexts.

The course will spend the first weeks examining the history of book bannings from colonial times up until today, comparing them with similar phenomena in other national contexts, and then focusing of a number of exemplary cases. This will help prepare students to then pick their own banned book in its historical context to research, which will form the basis of their 20-30 page final paper.

Students interested in this course should contact Professor Shoemaker via email (kbshoemaker@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course accompanied by a list of related courses they have taken.

Both law and religion penetrated every part of medieval European life. Could a soldier also be a Christian? When were military invasions justified? Could prisoners of war be enslaved? Could refugees be expelled from a church? Could a priest who committed crimes be prosecuted? Could you marry your second cousin? The answers, which in many cases are rather surprising, constituted a legal landscape that was complex and affected nearly every part of life in European society. In some cases, the answers to these questions continued to shape modern American law in surprising ways.

Students interested in enrolling should email Professor Suarez (smsuarez@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course.

How have the structures of American empire impacted Indigenous peoples in North America and the Pacific? How have Indigenous peoples persisted under settler colonization and imperialism over the past two and a half centuries of U.S. rule? How do Indigenous peoples negotiate their place in settler public memory? How have Indigenous relationships to their homelands been shaped by federal Indian law and policy? What does Indigenous resistance to settler cultural norms look like? This seminar explores these questions through an examination of the social, cultural, and political structures of Indigeneity under U.S empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Alongside an exploration of how settler colonialism and imperialism have imposed upon Indigenous lifeways, students will also learn how Indigenous peoples have maneuvered within systems of American empire to sustain Indigenous identity, community, and nationhood. Over the course of the semester we will examine diverse Indigenous histories across American empire including those of American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. Students will engage with multiple scholarly approaches to the topic of Indigeneity under empire by examining the construction and role of public memory, federal Indian policy and law, the environment, urbanization, and gender. This seminar utilizes interdisciplinary historical and Indigenous studies methodologies, which students will practice through primary sources analyses, seminar discussions, and an original (20 page) research paper.

Students interested in enrolling should email Professor Carlsson (eric.carlsson@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, whether History Major or Certificate student, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course accompanied by a list of related courses they have taken.

The historical record of early modern Europe (c. 1500-1800) is replete with accounts of the supernatural. Stories abound of healing miracles, apparitions, demonic possession, levitations, bilocations, and more. This was also an age of religious reformations, scientific revolution, and Enlightenment, marked by intense debates about the nature and reality of supernatural activity, whether diabolical or divine. In recent years, historians have renewed their focus on the place of the supernatural in early modern culture. They are re-examining long-held narratives about “disenchantment” and secularization in the period, while also rethinking how we make sense of past experiences that people claimed went beyond the ordinary.

In this seminar, we will delve into this fascinating world together, engaging contemporary scholarship that focuses on case studies from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. You will explore key historiographical debates, make oral presentations, and contribute actively to class discussions. The central project of the course is a substantial research paper of about twenty pages on a topic of your choice. The seminar’s goal is to help you think historically about the place of the supernatural in early modern culture while building your skills as a researcher and writer.

Students interested in enrolling should email Dr. Whatley (cwhatley@wisc.edu) with the following information: 1. Your name, student ID number, and email address; 2. Your expected graduation date; 3. Your Major(s)/Certificate(s); 4. 1-2 sentences explaining your interest in the course topic.

What makes a king a king? Moreover, what makes a king a legitimate king? How did kings use the law to legitimize themselves and their governance, and how does legal authority help a king stay a king? In this course, we explore the complex relationship between law, authority, and kingship. From Medieval Europe to modern America, we will examine how kings and king-like figures used law to their advantage, either to shore up a weak rulership or to strengthen and centralize an already strong one. We will analyze how royal decisions – like going to war or handling a catastrophic pandemic – have transformative effects on legal traditions and the societies that build them.