History 600/Hist Sci 555 Seminars

Students interested in this course should contact Professor Brandon Bloch via email (bjbloch@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, major(s), year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course.

Why do genocides happen, and how should the international community respond? What motivates the states that target minority or indigenous groups for annihilation, and the perpetrators who carry out genocidal policies? What should happen to the perpetrators in the aftermath of genocide—should they be summarily executed? Put on trial (by whom)? Allowed to reintegrate into society? Why are certain acts of state violence defined as “genocide” or “crimes against humanity,” and others as legitimate military operations? How can egregious violations of international law be prosecuted given the unequal distribution of power in the international state system?

This seminar explores these questions by examining five twentieth-century genocides and the international tribunals created in their wake: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Rwanda genocide, and the mass killings during the Yugoslav wars. We will investigate how international criminal tribunals shaped ideas about human rights and humanitarian intervention, and why they so often proved controversial. We will also address the concept of a “right of return” as a response to forced population displacements. We will conclude by discussing the International Criminal Court, as well as the legacies of twentieth-century genocides for today. Sources include survivor testimonies, accounts by journalists, film, international legal documents, and historical scholarship. The culminating assignment is an original research paper building on one of the cases studied in class.

Please note that this History 600 seminar will only be open to junior and senior History majors and History certificate students.

Students interested in this course should contact Professor Hall via email (jwhall3@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.

This course provides a broad introduction to recent and significant works in American military history from the pre-contact colonial era to the present, as well as the “state of the field.” It will familiarize students with the paramount historiographical issue within the field—American “ways of war”—as well as recent works in substantive subfield of “war and society.” Conducted in a seminar format alongside graduate students, undergraduates will at once receive an introduction to study at the graduate level and complete a research project that fulfills the capstone requirement for the history major or certificate.

This History 600 seminar will meet with the graduate seminar, History 958.

The history of the Americas has been shaped by the interplay of nature and development—from the watery Aztec city of Tenochtitlan to the sugar cane fields Bad Bunny depicted in his recent Super Bowl halftime performance. This course asks how the environment, natural resources, and natural commodities have shaped economies and societies throughout the Americas, from pre-Columbian times through the colonial era and independence struggles, to contestations over appropriate use of natural resources in the twentieth century and today. How has the production of sugar cane and other commodities shaped ongoing processes of colonialism and linkages between Latin American nations and other world regions? What does it mean to give legal rights to nature? From Patagonian ecotourism to the drug trade, how do the ways in which we imagine the nature of the Americas matter for local development?

We will explore these questions together, spending the first half of the semester working through several case studies before students choose their own topic—perhaps a particular place, technology, or commodity—for a 20-30 page historiographical research paper. Students will also present together on what they’ve learned in class for the Nelson Institute Capstone Showcase. Reading knowledge of Spanish or Portuguese helpful but not required.

You may register either through History or Environmental Studies, depending on the requirements of your major/certificate. Please email Prof. Hennessy (elizabeth.hennessy@wisc.edu) with “Americas capstone” in the subject line and include: your year in school; major or certificate program and which department you want to enroll through; student ID number; and a brief explanation of why you want to take this capstone and how your academic career has thus far prepared you.

Students interested in enrolling in this course should email Prof. Kantrowitz (skantrow@wisc.edu), including their major(s) and their expected semester of graduation, and explaining their interest in the course topic and any previous course or research experience that has prepared them to explore it.

Who belongs to the United States, and how? What forces—of law, race, language, religion, origin, and more—have determined people’s legal and social status? This seminar will offer models and examples of how historians of the U.S. and other North American places have explored these questions, ranging across the experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, European immigrants, and many other groups. Students will pursue individual research projects that fit broadly within this theme, producing a paper of about 20 pages based on original research.

Students interested in this course should email Professor Kinzley (kinzley@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.

Wisconsin has a long, but largely unstudied history of interactions with China. It does not take much scratching on the surface to reveal the stories of missionaries, traders, and government officials from Wisconsin who traveled to China beginning in the 19th century. Similarly, very little is known about those students and diplomats who came in the other direction, arriving in Wisconsin in the early 20th century and continuing up until today. In this class we will reveal these stories and in doing so, offer new perspectives on Chinese and Wisconsin history alike. This class is open to both Chinese and non-Chinese speakers and there are no course prerequisites for this class. For non-Chinese speakers there are plenty of sources available in English in the Memorial Library, Historical Society, and University Archives.

Students interested in enrolling should email Professor Lapina (lapina@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 watch, read about and discuss a series of films on various medieval subjects. Some of these films will be blockbusters, but most will be films that are little known to the general public. Some of them will be recent, but most will date from the middle to late 20th century. Some of them will be American, the rest European and Asian. We will gain an awareness of medieval realities and medieval texts on which these films are based. However, we will move beyond simply noting whether each film is offering a faithful or an unfaithful representation of historical events and will attempt to understand what attracted modern filmmakers to medieval history in the first place and what concerns – be they artistic, political, social, religious, etc. – made them represent it in the ways that they did. The students will have to choose a film, a cluster of films, or a topic that runs across a series of films, which they will analyze in their essays and oral presentations.

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 armed conflicts in 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, particularly its geopolitical dimension. Beyond such an approach, the course will give students sharpened analytical abilities, refined research skills, improved oral presentations, and better writing.

Application: Students interested in this seminar, should send me a short email at <awmccoy@wisc.edu>, stating: (a.) their status (Junior, Senior); (b.) major (History or other); (c.) past courses with this instructor, if any; (d.) GPA (overall and in major); (e.) campus ID (to facilitate registration); and (e.) a sentence about their interest in the course.

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 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 this course should email Professor James Sweet (jhsweet@wisc.edu) with their campus ID number, major, year in college, and a brief description of their interest in the course, accompanied by a list of related courses they have taken. Those interested in the class and seeking more information can also arrange a mutually agreeable meeting time with Prof. Sweet, using the email given above. 

This seminar will involve participants in a semester-long discussion of the ways in which Major League Baseball has both reflected and shaped broader currents of social, cultural, political and economic change in American society since World War II. Thus, rather than understand baseball’s history in terms of pennant races, players’ statistics or the other considerations that often arise in the daily press, this seminar asks students to understand baseball—and, by extension, sport in general—in the contexts that have shaped it throughout its development. Seminar participants will benefit in particular from the perspectives of Allan H. Selig, whose involvement in these events included his role in his ownership of the Milwaukee Brewers, having brought the team to Milwaukee, and culminating in his becoming the longest-serving Commissioner of Major League Baseball, from the early 1990s until 2015.

The seminar will consist of weekly discussions of pivotal topics or moments in post-war baseball history. These subjects will run a gamut of such likely topics as the role of race/ethnicity, a changing media landscape, the game’s geographical expansion, labor relations, baseball’s economic footprint on the nation and in localities, shifting relations between the sport and government, as well as prominent controversies over the course of the last seven decades. As preparation for discussion, students will read a set of sources assigned weekly by the instructors. Participation in discussion of the weekly readings accounts for a large part of the final grade. As a research seminar, the course’s other major component will be a research paper of 20-25 pages on a topic of the student’s choice, using the abundant primary and secondary resources available in the Wisconsin Historical Society holdings, as well as other sources that students identify.