Spring 2005 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Spring 2005. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

History

[HIS-030C] [HIS-133] [HIS-137] [HIS-138] [HIS-182] [HIS-196K] [HIS-196M] [HIS-224]

30C. Europe in the 20th Century

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
Office: 276 Stevenson, 459-3467
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu

Course information on course website:

http://media.ucsc.edu/classes/thompson/history30c/

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133. Modern Germany

Note: Draft Syllabus

MW 7:00-8:45 p.m.
Classroom: Cowell 131
Instructor: Mark Cioc, cioc@ucsc.edu
Office: Stevenson 281, Office Hrs: TBA
Phone: 459-3817
TA: Raphaelle Steinzig

Course Description

History 133 is an upper-division lecture course. It offers an overview of the political, military, diplomatic, social, economic, and intellectual developments of 19th- and 20th-century Germany and (to a lesser extent) Austria. Students are expected to attend the lectures, read the books, and pass two written exams. Each exam will cover a distinct period of history; there will be no comprehensive "final" exam.

The required books are listed below. They can be purchased at Slug Books, next to the 7-11 Convenience Store and Bay Federal Credit Union near the base of campus. Please note: the reading assignments supplement the lectures (or vice versa, depending on your perspective). In order to do well on the exams, you will have to attend class and read the books. In other words, set aside reading time this quarter, or you might end up regretting that you took this course (well, you may be sorry anyway, given the dismal legacy of the Germans, but that is another story).

Required Texts:

• Dietrich Orlow, A History of Modern Germany, 1871 to Present
• Bruce Waller, Bismarck
• V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914
• Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler
• David Robinson, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
• Anton Kaes, M
• Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler
• Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

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137. Modern Jewish Intellectual History

Note: Syllabus from a previous quarter

Instructor: Bruce Thompson
E-mail: brucet@ucsc.edu
Office: 276 Stevenson, 459-3467

Course Description

This course offers a survey of European Jewish intellectual history from the Enlightenment through the first half of the 20th century. Major themes include Jewish mysticism and rationalism, the romance of assimilation, the flowering of Yiddish literature, the origins of Zionism, new understandings of history and of the messianic idea, responses to the Holocaust, and Jewish contributions to the culture of urban modernism.

Requirements: one six-page essay (due Monday, April 29) and one ten-page essay (due Friday, May 24), regular attendance.

Topics and Readings:

1. Introduction: Children of Spinoza (March 27-29)

Topics: Judaism and Modernity—Pariahs and Parvenus—Commentary and Criticism

Reading: I.B. Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street," in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

2. Mysticism and Messianism (April 1-5)

Topics: History and Catastrophe—From Sabbatianism to Hasidism—Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem

Reading: Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, lectures 1, 7-9
Dov Ber Ben Shmuel, "Tales of the Baal-Shem-Tov," in The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination, trans. Joachim Neugroschel
I.L. Peretz, "If Not Higher"

3. A Fine Romance: Dilemmas of Emancipation and Assimilation (April 8-12)

Topics: The Jewess in the Salon—Heine's Jewish Comedy—Disraeli and Orientalism

Reading: Hannah Arendt, "Jewess and Shlemihl," "Writing Rahel Varnhagen: From a Letter to Karl Jaspers," in The Portable Hannah Arendt
Moses Mendelssohn and Rahel Varnhagen, selections in The German-Jewish Dialogue, ed. Ritchie Robertson
Heinrich Heine, "On Shylock" and "Jehuda ben Halevy," in The German-Jewish Dialogue
Hannah Arendt, "The Jews and Society," in Portable Hannah Arendt

4. Out of the Shtetl: The Birth of Yiddish Literature (April 15-19)

Topics: Ghetto and Shtetl—Sholom Aleichem: Humor and Pathos—Peretz and Poland

Reading: Sholom Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin
I.L.Peretz, "Bryna's Mendl"

5. Demons and Dybbuks: From Folklore to Literature (April 22-26)

Topics: Judaism and the Occult—Ansky and Anthropology—The Golem of Prague

Reading: S. Ansky, Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Der Nister, selections in The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination
I.L. Peretz, "The Golem"
I.B. Singer, "The Gentleman from Cracow," "Taibele and Her Demon," "The Last Demon," "Henne Fire," and "The Destruction of Kreshev," in Collected Stories

6. The Angel of History (April 29-May 3)

Topics: Benjamin and Scholem—The Spell of Narrative and the Aura of Art—Zionism: From Herzl to Scholem

Reading: Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," "Franz Kafka," "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," "Theses on the Philosophy of History," "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Theodor Herzl, "An Autobiography," in German-Jewish Dialogue
Gershom Scholem, "From His Diaries," in German-Jewish Dialogue
Franz Kafka, "Before the Law," "An Imperial Message" and "Jackals and Arabs"

Recommended: Hannah Arendt, introduction to Illuminations

7. How It Was Done in Odessa: Isaac Babel (May 6-10)

Topics: The Jews of Odessa—Babel's Red Cavalry—Ashes out of Hope

Reading: Isaac Babel, "The Story of My Dovecot," "First Love," Di Grasso," "Guy de Maupassant," "Gedali," "My First Goose," "The Rebbe," "The Death of Dolgushov," "The Rebbe's Son," "Odessa Stories," in Collected Stories, trans. David McDuff
Lionel Trilling, Introduction to Collected Stories

8. Shoah (May 13-24)

Topics: Poetry After Auschwitz—Paul Celan and Primo Levi—Hannah Arendt and the Eichmann Controversy—Holocaust Diaries

Reading: Hannah Arendt, "What Remains? The Language Remains," in The Portable Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, selections from Eichmann in Jerusalem in Portable Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, "A Letter to Mary McCarthy" and "A Response to Gershom Scholem" in Portable Hannah Arendt
Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, poems
Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness (selections)

Film: Anne Frank Remembered by Jon Amiel

9. The Ghost Writer: Singer and His World (May 29-31)

Topics: Singer and Poland—Singer's Demons—Lost in America

Reading: I.B. Singer, In My Father's House
I.B. Singer, "Gimpel the Fool," "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," "The Little Shoemakers," "The Slaughterer," "A Friend of Kafka," "Short Friday," "The Unseen," "The Cafeteria," "The Cabalist of East Broadway," in The Collected Stories

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History 137. Jewish Intellectual History

Suggestions for the First Paper

1. Examine the image of the scholar in Yiddish literature. How do treatments of this figure by Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and/or S. Ansky illuminate the strengths and stresses of the European Jewish community on the verge of modernity?
2. Examine the image of women in any two or three texts by Sholem Aleichem, Y.L. Peretz, and/or S. Ansky. Again, how do the female characters created by these writers illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the Jewish community on the verge of modernity?
3. A characteristic pattern in modern Jewish intellectual history might be described in terms of recoil and recovery. That is, the secularized (or even converted) Jewish intellectual in the era of emancipation rejects a traditional Jewish identity in the pursuit of a career, but sooner or later returns to aspects of the Jewish tradition for one reason or another. Compare any two of the three major cases we have encountered: Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli.
4. There are few examples in modern intellectual history of a literature that flowered as suddenly as Yiddish literature did in the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. How do you account for that flowering? Choose texts by Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and/or S. Ansky and define each author's distinctive brand of creativity.
5. We have seen that Judaism in the early modern period embraced several varieties of mysticism and the occult. How and why have modern Jewish writers incorporated mystical and occult themes in their texts?

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History 137. Jewish Intellectual History

Suggestions for the Second Paper

1. Angels and demons are relatively scarce in the Hebrew Bible, but not at all uncommon in the modern Jewish intellectual tradition. Write an essay on the uses of the occult or of the messianic in modern Jewish fiction (Peretz, Ansky, Kafka, Singer) or historiography (Benjamin, Scholem).
2. If the classic Yiddish writers often focused on the predicament of the (religious) scholar, 20th-century fiction by Jewish writers tends to focus on the figure of the (secular) intellectual. And the intellectual is often forced to confront situations that have less to do with the life of the mind than with the temptations and trials of the body. Write an essay on the treatment of sexuality and/or violence in stories by Singer and Babel.
3. Even as they revise our sense of the uses and meanings of the Jewish tradition, the great modern Jewish thinkers and writers (Peretz, Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin, Arendt, Babel) suggest new understandings of the origins and possibilities of modernity. Write an essay on the relations between tradition and modernity in one or more of these writers.
4. One trend in modern Jewish intellectual history might be called "neo-Hasidism"—the appropriation of the image of the Hasid or "wonder-rabbi" in literary texts. Compare and contrast images of this figure in works by Peretz, Ansky, Babel, and/or Singer.
5. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem created one of the liveliest controversies in modern Jewish intellectual history. Given your own understanding of the Eichmann trial and the Holocaust, write a defense or a critique of Arendt's work.
6. Compare any three approaches to the Holocaust in works we have encountered this quarter (essays, fiction, poetry, diaries, films). Please feel free to consider texts or works from beyond our curriculum as well.

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Sample of Lecture Notes:

Kafka the Kabbalist

1. Kafka In Prague

Kafka, as everyone knows, was a doubly marginal figure, as a Jew writing in German in a city where the majority of the populace spoke Czech. Prague Jewry was more remote from Judaism than the Jews of eastern Europe were, or even the Jews of Berlin. The reason: an unusually rapid assimilation in a city where the Jews were the natural allies of the German against the Czechs.

Prague was an ancient central European city with an old Jewish quarter, haunted by legends (the story of the golem for example). But it was also a modern capital, seat of a vast and alien (German-speaking) bureaucracy ruling over a downtrodden populace (Czech-speaking) that did not know the meaning of the complicated regulations it had to obey. From these elements Kafka would build up a picture of human anguish in the face of the mysteries of existence that was both dreamlike and concrete, fantastic and real at the same time.

The world of Kafka's novels incorporates the maddening impersonality and inscrutability of modern bureaucracy in an image of an insecure medieval community derived from a ghetto Kafka remembered obsessively without ever having lived in it. His heroes are often isolated outsiders, scapegoats. Cut off from community and authority, they often become eavesdroppers, straining to get some sort of purchase on what's being said. What Kafka did was to convert the distinctive quandaries of Jewish existence into images of the existential dilemmas of mankind as such. His stories are repeatedly concerned with questions such as exile, assimilation, endangered community, revelation, commentary, law, tradition, and commandment. In spite of the pervasive atmosphere of menace—there are hostile and inscrutable authorities above, and a generally indifferent but potentially violent crowd of common folk below—there is a comic note in virtually all of Kafka's work. This too is a legacy of Judaism: the sense of a radical discrepancy between the transcendent Creator and the paltry human creature. It's typical of the Hebrew text of the Bible that its characters are caught in a labyrinth of ambiguous messages. Endless interpretation, interminable analysis—this is an aspect of the Jewish tradition converted by Kafka into a particular kind of modernism. His characters are modern versions of Abraham or Job—always on trial.

The Prague ghetto was abolished in 1850, incorporated with the rest of the inner city under the name of Josefstadt in memory of the liberal benefactor of the Jews, the Austrian Emperor Joseph II. In 1900 there were roughly 450,000 inhabitants of Prague, of whom 35,000 spoke German, and many of these were Jews. Only 8 percent of Prague's population, the German-speaking elite, enjoyed two splendid theaters, a huge concert hall, two universities, two daily newspapers, and an intense social life. But as one of Kafka's contemporaries noted: "In Prague the Germans live in quicksand. The political tension of the last few decades has made coexistence between the Germans and the Czechs an extremely uncomfortable matter, creating a climate of represses violence which limits the spontaneity of bourgeois life."

Kafka's grandfather was a kosher butcher in a small Bohemian village. With the official emancipation of the Bohemian Jews after 1848, Jews could move from the country to the city: the case of Prague is parallel to that of Vienna. Kafka's father Hermann (b. 1852) decided to seek his fortune in Prague, where he set up a retail store dealing in haberdashery, parasols, umbrellas, and walking sticks. He gradually expanded it through hard work and an advantageous marriage into one of the major wholesale businesses in the city and surrounding provinces. These were fashionable, decorative goods, part of a developing traffic in commodities appealing to an increasingly affluent bourgeoisie—Simmel's world of modern commerce.

Kafka followed a typical Jewish pattern: pious village grandfather, successful urban merchant father, professional son. A law degree landed him a job as a clerk in the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where he was responsible for interviewing the victims of factory accidents. He knew from the inside the cumbersome bureaucratic apparatus of paper work and hierarchy, indifference and incompetence, that he would satirize in his fiction. He also came to know well the terrible working conditions of the urban proletariat.

He began to lead a double life—bureaucrat by day, writer by night—and he described himself as a night-time writer, one whose work is born in the time when we cannot sleep because of feelings of dread. The initial breakthrough into literature seems to have come as a result of the conflict with his philistine father: the vigorous self-made man versus the neurotic and intellectual son. Freud described the pattern in 1908: "Those who succumb to nervous illness are precisely the offspring of fathers who, having been born of rough but vigorous families, living in simple healthy country conditions, had successfully established themselves in the metropolis, and in a short space of time had brought their children to a high level of culture." But Kafka fashioned an unforgettable image of modernity out of his neurosis.

2. Soundless Explosions

He developed, quite early, his characteristic style—a stripped-down German that discarded local context. "Prague in his novels is a city without memory. It has even forgotten its name.... Time in Kafka's novels is the time of a humanity that no longer knows anything or remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets" (Milan Kundera). And while the past is vacant, the future is perpetually deferred. Hence the infinite regressions in Kafka, a good example of which is "An Imperial Messenger."

The key to this style: matter-of-fact presentation of the surreal. Kafka often renders the everyday event as impossibly difficult; and the impossible, unimaginable phenomenon as an everyday event. The characteristic retardation of time in his fiction fuses banality with menace and suggests the calmness, and clamminess, of a nightmare. There is a pervasive sense of jeopardy in the great labyrinth of arbitrary law, the indifferent officials, the hierarchies above hierarchies, the insufficient papers, the endless wait before a door that never opens. Benign divinity in Kafka's world is replaced by random arbitrations and absent authorities.

Kafka's theme: the existentialist anguish of man confronted with the mystery of existence—our inability to know where we have come from and where are going and what obligations we have to fulfill. He's not interested in the burden of guilt carried by the religious believer who has transgressed against known and clearly definable rules, but rather in a consciousness of transgression without any clear knowledge of the rules that have been broken. In the great novels, the characters never know where they stand and are confronted by fundamentally incalculable situations. Despite the reign of a super-bureaucracy, they are not informed of their rights, of their status or assignment, or of the charges against them. And they have a mania for interpretation—typical perhaps of the individual who is marginalized and deprived of power, and on a cultural plane, typical of the Jewish tradition.

The stories have an oneiric (dreamlike) character—they are like dreams in that they invite interpretation but seem to withhold the key. There is only a single point of view: that of the protagonist. The vocabulary is one of inference and conjecture: "apparently"; "maybe." The sentences often consist of two clauses: the first states a fact or a guess; the second qualifies, questions, or negates it. The conjunction "but" is common, and the frequent use of "even if" clauses expresses the tendency to cancel expectations and refute inferences. A lot of this writing is in the subjunctive. This is a world in which nothing ever gets truly resolved, in which any decisive, conclusive event would be incongruous, because no event or series of events could ever suffice to dissolve the enormous burden of doubt, ignorance, and apprehension that Kafka calls up from the first sentence. Very little actually happens in his world; what prolongs narration is not events, but anxious worried reasoning about them—the action consists largely of the formation, elaboration, and abandonment of hypotheses that never quite fit the case.

Kafka combines the archaic and the modern: reviving the furies of antiquity, the fatality lurking at the root of human existence, he encloses them within a prosaic framework of litigation, petty worries, and bureaucratic tedium. "Poseidon sat at his desk doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work." The long tradition of Western individualism is now at the end of the line; the hero is now a victim; and in his conflict with society he has suffered a stunning defeat. Hope is an illusion: "There is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us." Again: "The Messiah will appear only when he is no longer needed, he will arrive the day after his arrival, he will not come on the last of days, but on the day after the last." And: "The hunting dogs are still playing in the courtyard, but the hare will not escape them no matter how fast it may already be flying through the woods."

Kafka's usual hero is committed as well as resigned to routine, but the story really begins only with the disruption of routine, and proceeds mostly through attempts to return to routine. "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry: this occurs repeatedly, again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony." Kafka's protagonists attempt to convert disruption itself into an aspect of routine. It's the principle of the "soundless explosion"—withholding even a pianissimo where a fortissimo is expected (to use a musical terminology). This anti-sensationalism of tone, this refusal to make an issue of the unusual, confers upon the unusual and even upon the horrible a peculiar kind of intimacy. Kafka makes the strange familiar, the familiar strange.

From Kafka's diary: "Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor."

3. Zionist and Kabbalist

Walter Sokel, one of the best Kafka scholars, suggests how Kafka's particular family constellation led him to Zionism: "Financial success and prosperity were [for Kafka's parents] substitutes for lost roots and traditions, and compensation for the lack of full civic participation. But Kafka's parents, devoted to their store, had no time for him. Frightened by his father's giant strength and irascible temper, Franz craved, but never received, tenderness and attention from his mother. Starved for love and recognition, the lonely child developed that insatiable hunger for community, for natural warmth, affection, bonds of closeness, that goes a long way toward explaining the overwhelming attraction the Yiddish-speaking community acquired for him. To him his father's residual Jewishness was a parody of religion and a mockery of the kind of community Kafka longed for…. All the Jewish figures that were to recall Kafka to Judaism were rebels with the courage to defy their fathers, to break away from stifling surroundings."

Robert Alter on Kafka's Kabbalism: "Kafka deeply understood that Judaism was a message-oriented system, and he made the triadic Jewish chain of revelation, law (the message), and interpretation central to his fiction. But in consonance with the more radical currents of the Kabbalah, he was prepared to contemplate the consequences of a 'zero degree' of meaning, a divine 'nothingness' at the heart of revelation. There is something of gnosticism in the metaphysical scheme Kafka frequently assumed: perhaps there is knowledge and a divine source of knowledge, meaningful script and pregnant messages, but these are beyond our access, and in our fallen world we are left with only the gestures of interpretation, perhaps an empty consolation, perhaps the promissory note we cling to for a future when meanings will be given."

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138. Women and American Religious Culture

Instructor: Marilyn Westerkamp

Course Description

A historical introduction to the religious culture of the United States as experienced and created by women. This course will explore religious ideas about women, the treatment of women by mainstream institutions and religio/social communities, and female religious leaders and followers. The course takes an explicitly feminist analytical approach and will use a variety of "texts," including historical and literary scholarship, sacred texts, fiction, autobiography, material artifacts, visual arts, and music.

When considering women as believers, participants, and leaders, issues frequently ignored by historians of religion come to the fore, including cultural instability, sexuality, deviance, and, of course, power. As people who are frequently disfranchised by institutions and ideological systems (and religion is no exception to this), women are keenly aware of the gendered power dynamics at work.

Students should not expect a comprehensive or all-inclusive treatment of the subject(s). Not all communities, leaders, or groups of women will be examined; ten weeks is just too short. Rather, the course will focus upon critical moments and transformative movements as a pathway for exploring the experiences of women in relation to their communities, themselves, and their gods.

Readings will be selected from among the following books:

• Susan Dinan and Debra Myers, ed., Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds
• Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England
• Carol Devens, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and the Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900
  
• Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England
  
• Catherine Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845
  
• Ruth Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture
  
• William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three African American Women's Spiritual Autobiographies
  
• Ann Braude, Radical Spirits
  
• Nell Irwin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol
  
• Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California
  
• Betty DeBerg, Ungodly Women
  
• Catherine Wessinger, Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions
  
• Robert Anthony Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude
  
• Mark Stephen Massa, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team
  
• Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam's Kitchen
  
• Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History
• R. Marie Griffith, God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission
• John Fialka, Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America
• Pamela S. Nadell and Jonathan Sarna, Women and American Judaism
• Julie Byrne, O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs
• Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice of the Church

In addition, students will read from primary source documents, including

Witchcraft and Heresy Trials
Conversion Narratives
Spiritual Autobiographies
Diaries and Journals
Theological and Biblical Scholarship
Visual Representations and Hymnology

Students will attend lectures and meet in seminar discussion once per week. Requirements for the course and basis for evaluation include:

1. Attendance and participation in section discussions
2. One five-seven page paper that provides a gendered analysis of a primary text
3. One 10-12 page research paper on subject of student's choice
4. A final exam essay (take home) that examines one late 20th-century theologian or movement in light of her/its historical trajectory and the thematics of the course.

Schedule for the Course:

Week One
Origins of religious traditions, including Native American spirituality; European Judaism, Protestant, and Catholic Christianities; and West African spiritual traditions. Missionary activities and the disparate response of indigenous men/women to missionary efforts.

Week Two
Puritanism, heresy trials, witchcraft accusations, and the model of good women. Gendering God, the soul, good, and evil. Women's vs. Men's Conversion Narratives

Week Three
Impact of Revivalism, Revolution, and Enlightenment upon women's and men's participation in religion; the beginnings of secularization, evangelicalism, and the ideology of domestic piety. Early women preachers and prophets; rising success of Christian missionaries among African Americans; the strength of African American women preachers.

Week Four
The flourishing of the domestic piety movement and the tie to safe reform efforts among evangelical and old school Protestant communities. Alternatives to the mainstream, including Shakers, Mormons, the Oneida community, political progressives (especially abolitionists), Spiritualists, and perfectionists.

Week Five
New Immigrants and the nature of the challenge to American religious culture; Catholic nuns as promulgators of culture, including educational institutions for girls; Jewish women as centers of culture through family; competition among missionary women for the souls of indigenous Americans, Pacific Islanders, and South Asians. Engendering indigenous American revitalization movements.

Week Six
The crisis of women's health and the rise of alternative movements, including Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Science. Additionally, the arrival of Buddhism and traditional Chinese religion alongside bourgeois America's romance with Asian mysticisms.

Week Seven
Modernity (including scientific Biblical criticism and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Women's Bible), Fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism. This week incorporates a consideration of the roots of media evangelism as exemplified in Aimee Semple McPherson's Four Square Gospel Church.

Week Eight
Responses to the Holocaust/Cold War/Civil Rights movement. Includes Jewish women's search for meaning in the aftermath of WWII; the intensification of America's church attendance and women's role as keeper of domestic piety. Also addresses radical reform efforts such as Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement and women involved in Civil Rights.

Weeks Nine and Ten
The course ends with an extensive focus upon religious women's responses to the challenges raised by Civil Rights, Vatican II, Liberation Theology, and the women's movement. Students will explore the range of feminist theology of the late 20th century, including Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Islamic theologians, women who work to reach beyond the parochial boundaries of the U.S., and women who rejected the major traditions.

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182. The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877

Note: This course description from Winter 2001

Instructor: Bruce Levine
Office: Stevenson 278

Course Description

This course treats the period of civil war and reconstruction as the United States' second revolution. Much about the country's history for the next century and beyond was decided during these decisive years. We will begin by tracing how the decades-long political struggle over slavery during the first half of the 19th century erupted into military conflict in 1861. In the course of studying the war, three related themes will be emphasized: (1) what factors determined the war's outcome, (2) how the methods and goals of both sides changed in the course of the fighting, and (3) how the war altered life in both the North and the South. Although the Confederacy's defeat ended the war, the struggle over the shape of the post-slavery South continued long after Appomattox. In studying this subject, we will focus on the distinct and conflicting ways in which different groups of Americans approached the issues of reconstructing the South and the nation during the war and postwar years.

Required Texts

• James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford, 1988)
  
• Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (HarperCollins, 1990)
  
• Michael Perman, ed., Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Heath, 2d ed., 1998)
  
• Ira Berlin, et al., eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (The New Press, 1992)
  
• Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Vintage, 1996)

Course Requirements

All students are expected to attend all lectures and to complete all reading and writing assignments on schedule. Attendance and active participation in section meetings is also mandatory. There will be three two essay-type exams, each of which will be based upon both readings and lectures. Each exam will be given as a take-home assignment.

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196K. Topics in Medieval History: The Crusades

M 5:00-8:00 p.m.
Crown 105
Instructor: Brian Catlos

For course information, go to the following PDF file:

pdf/his196k-052.pdf

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196M. End of Slavery and Serfdom

Note: This course description from Winter 2001

Instructor: Bruce Levine
Office: Stevenson 278

Course Description

This course sets the United States' experience with slavery and its elimination in comparative perspective. More specifically, it compares the historical trajectory of slavery in the United States with the rise and decline of this and other forms of bound labor elsewhere in the western hemisphere, Europe, and southern Africa. Class discussion will focus upon readings that address one or another general or locally specific aspect of the international comparison.

Among other subjects, we will investigate the origins of and differences between serfdom and slavery. We will inquire into the relationship between rights and power in slave societies, on the one hand, and differences in national origin and race, on the other. We will ask why in some cases emancipation occurred in a violent and revolutionary manner, but, in others, occurred peacefully and gradually. We will ask how the experience of emancipation in one country influenced developments in others. Finally, we will inquire into the long-term impact that different types of emancipation had on upon post-emancipation life in different countries.

Course Requirements

Each student will write one short paper (approximately 5-8 pages) every other week discussing the readings assigned for that week. Students will be graded and/or evaluated on the basis of these essays and their contribution to classroom discussion.

Readings will include selections from works such as the following:

• Raymond Grew, "The Case for Comparing Histories"
• Evsey D. Domar, "The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis"
• Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
• Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848
• George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History
• Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean
• Thomas C. Holt, "‘An Empire Over the Mind’: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South"
• Eric Foner, "The Anatomy of Emancipation"
• Barbara J. Field, "Who Freed the Slaves?"
• Barbara Jeanne Fields, "The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World"
• George Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution
• Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience, 1660-1815
• Theodore S. Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany, 1815-1871
• Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe

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224. Social and Cultural History

Instructor: Jonathan Beecher

Course Description

This graduate seminar is mistakenly listed as a Research Seminar. In fact, it will be a Readings Seminar devoted to the reading and discussion of eight or nine works in social and cultural history. Unlike History 205B, which was organized chronologically, this course will be organized thematically and will consider a variety of paradigms and perspectives in social and cultural history.

I'm still thinking about the assigned readings, and I would be delighted to discuss possibilities with anyone interested. (I should add that I am, by all means, open to assigning works on non-European history.) At this point, I imagine the course as divided into two halves. In the first half we would read classic 20th-century works suggesting perspectives on history and theory. In the second half we would read recent works in intellectual and cultural history. As of now, the projected reading list looks something like this:

Part I: Theoretical Perspectives

• Popular Culture: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, and essay by Caryl Emerson.
• Public Sphere: Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and
  review article by Dena Goodman.
• Experience and Literary Representation: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, and essay by Hayden White.
• Art, Technology, and Mass Society: Walter Benjamin, "Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism." Essay by Hannah Arendt.

Part II: Recent Historical Work

• History of an Event: Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight, and review essay by
  David Bell.
• Psychoanalytically Informed Biography in a Social and Cultural Matrix: Arthur Mitzman,
  Michelet, Historian, and chapter by Edmund Wilson.
• A City and its Culture: Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhard, and essay by
  Carl Schorske.
• The History of Memory: Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, and AHR 2001 article.

In the case of almost all of the books, we will be reading selections and not the whole book. Since this is most definitely a course in gestation, I would be pleased to hear from anyone who is thinking of taking it.

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