Department of History

Prehistory to 800 CE. History 4A introduces students to the histories of the ancient Near East, North Africa and Europe, an understanding of which is important for studying later European history. Lectures and readings examine cultural, economic, intellectual, military, political, religious, and other aspects of the period. Weekly small group sections in which students discuss historical sources and methods are an essential part of this course.

Provides essential historical context for understanding major issues and developments in contemporary life; topics vary each year. Coverage ranges from the local to the global, and encompasses current events in politics, economics, social relations, welfare, science, religion, and popular culture.

Through studying a particular topic in history, students gain insight into historical methods and skills. Course designed for freshmen and sophomore history majors or prospective majors. Others may enroll by permission of instructor. Topics vary by quarter and instructor.

Through studying a particular topic in history, students gain insight into historical methods and skills. Course designed for freshmen and sophomore history majors or prospective majors. Others may enroll by permission of instructor. Topics vary by quarter and instructor.

Colonial through Jacksonian era. A survey of the leading issues in American life from colonial times to the present. The course focuses on politics, cultural development, social conflict, economic life, foreign policy, and influential ideas. Features discussion sections.

Explores how science, technology and/or medicine have helped shape modern societies (roughly 1850-present). Themes include formation of scientific and technical communities, the interactions of science with political and popular culture, and the social context of knowledge production.

A general introduction to the history, politics, culture, and social life of the modern Middle East. Begins with the nineteenth century Ottoman reforms known as the Tanzimat and moves on to cover capitalist consolidation, the rise of European colonialism, the state-building process, social movements, Cold War politics, and the growth of the oil industry. Pays particular attention to how twentieth century transformations shaped new modes of identification including nationalism and citizenship, feminism, sectarianism, pan-Arabism, Third Worldism, Islamism.

Prehistory to c. 1800. History 49-A- B-C is a general survey course designed to introduce students to major themes in African history. The course focuses on organization of production, state formation, African civilizations and identities, science and technology, beliefs and knowledge systems, Africa’s interaction with the world economy, such as through enslavement and slave trades. Weekly discussion sections are an important feature of this course, enabling students to develop and expand upon material presented during lecture.

Historical and interdisciplinary perspectives on poverty and inequality globally and in the U.S., tracing structural transformations, shifting modes of thought, policy, and action, dynamics of class, racial, gender, ethnic and geographic stratification, and major theoretical debates from antiquity through the present. Course features guest lectures to introduce students to varied conceptual and methodological approaches to studying poverty and inequality, and draws on readings, discussion, writing, and related assignments to explore issues within a social justice framework.

Exploration of same-sex intimacies and gender variance in ancient Greek, pre-modern Oceania, medieval Europe, Tokugawa Japan, modern Africa, and North America. Introduction to the theoretical questions in the study of sexuality and how scholars have used these tools.

The history of science in the West from Copernicus to Lavoisier: the transition from medieval, theocentric views of human nature and its operation to secular and mechanistic views in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the transition from natural philosophy to science. The role of science in Western culture.

Explores the rich multicultural worlds of medieval Italy, 1000-1300: the Greek south and Muslim Sicily; Norman military conquest and their extraordinary multiethnic aristocratic courts; the commercial revolution and the fluid society of the towns; papal monarchy and religious reactions: saints and heretics; the brutal factional wars of the thirteenth century; popular stories and poetry. The course ends with Dante’s Inferno.

The roles of women, gender, and sexuality in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Exploration of the nature of women and revolution: religious, legal, scientific, and popular conceptions of gender and sexuality; industrialization and family life, the rise of organized feminism.

The Nazi campaign of ethnic purification through eugenics and mass murder can be considered a watershed event in European history. This course examines the factors that combined to result in the Nazi genocides, as well as the contexts, causes and consequences of other modern genocides.

Exploration of selected topics pertaining to the Holocaust through memoirs, historiography, and works of fiction. The course is structured as a dialog between students and the instructor based on written analyses of the literature.

Explores the history of U.S.-Mexican relations from 1821 to the present. Topics include: U.S. intervention in Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, the Good Neighbor Program, immigration, NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico border, and War on Drugs. Students will learn to read, interpret, and analyze foreign policy, primary, and secondary sources.

The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the nation’s most significant social questions ranging from segregation to same-sex marriage and women’s work. Designed to put these and other decisions in proper context, this course covers U.S. legal history from the founding period to the present, with special attention to the evolution of legal conceptions of property, race and gender, civil rights, and criminal justice. Students must read critically and make arguments based on evidence.

The rise of a world religion and the emergence of a new multi-ethnic society under its aegis; the evolution of social and political institutions within the Universal caliphate; the creation of a specifically Islamic culture and intellectual life.

A seminar on a topic in African history. A research paper is required.

Explores the experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Americas, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Looks at ways in which men and women (enslaved and free) negotiated their imposed conditions from the colonial period to the present. Considers the methodological challenges of writing a history of people who did not produce primary sources. Underscores the contribution that people of African-descent have made and the debates that continue shaping the discipline.

Africa is the only continent with a Muslim majority, with more than a quarter of the world’s Muslims living there. Americans tend to associate Islam with Arabs, but Africans greatly outnumber Arabs in the religion. There are more Muslims in Nigeria than in Egypt, more in Ethiopia than Iraq. 1/6th of the world’s Muslims reside in sub-Saharan Africa. How did this come to be? How has the adoption of Islam by Africans shaped their history? And, conversely, how have Africans shaped Islam? We answer these questions by exploring 14 centuries of Islamic African history. We also explore Islam as a system of religious meaning by studying the teachings and writings of African Muslims.

Social history of women in America from 1800 to 1900. Changing marriage, reproduction and work patterns, and cultural values about the female role. Attention to racial, class and ethnic differences. Analysis of feminist thought and the several women’s movements.

Analyzes antislavery movements in U.S. from the Revolution to the present, with special focus on the enslaved, Black abolitionists, and transatlantic reformers.

The history of the Chicanos from the indigenous/colonial past to 1900. Explores the evolving history of Mexican descent people during the Pre-Columbian, Spanish, Mexican, and the U.S. periods.

Eurasia is the largest geographical feature on earth. It gave birth to the earliest civilizations and fostered the antecedents of many modern cultures. Yet, in much historical writing, the regions of Eurasia are treated as isolated units with independent trajectories. This is an artifact of nationalism and ignores the key role that trans-Eurasian interaction played in world history. This course investigates the movement of people, technology, ideas, and images across Eurasia from 3,000 BC to the present. It encourages one to think of a past world without national boundaries, a vast interconnected organism inside which materials and ideas were transmitted in all directions, adapted to the cultural and environmental needs of specific areas.

Through this year-long internship, students work under faculty direction to produce an issue of the UCSB History Department’s Undergraduate Journal. Students meet every two weeks and gain practical experience in scholarly publishing disseminating calls for papers, soliciting undergraduate contributions, locating peer reviewers, facilitating revisions with authors, and bibliographic and copywriting work. They also gain a working knowledge of the UCSB Library’s online publication platform, which will host the journal. Students utilize various digital humanities tools – podcasts, social media, and websites – to promote the undergraduate research being published in Journal as well as host an annual showcase of scholars’ work.

Imperial Commodities, Consumer Society and Race in Global History

Since the early 1980s, scholars in both the humanities and social sciences have become fascinated with that “queer thing,” the “commodity.”  They have all argued that the making, selling, using and displaying of commodities has occupied a central place in “modern” cultures in Europe and North America, but also in South America, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.  Nineteenth-century social and economic theorists such as Karl Marx believed commodities and their conspicuous display were a distinctive feature of modern industrialized and urbanized societies. Historians, however, have found “consumer revolutions” in many different times and places ranging from the 14^th through the 21st centuries. A recent wave or subset of this scholarship on commodities have been to consider the relationship between the growth of consumer culture and imperialism, dubbing some key things as “imperial commodities.” Of course, the definition of an imperial commodity is up for grabs, but scholars have used that term to emphasize how the consumption, distribution, production, and circulation of things such as tobacco, sugar, tea, rubber have contributed to the making and unmaking of empires, race, and capitalism.  In this class, we will focus particularly on such questions from the vantage point of empires, colonies, and postcolonial states in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa since the 17^th century. 

A reading course in a field of the professor’s specialty. Introduces the student to the sources and literature of the field in question. Written work as prescribed by the instructor. E. Europe.

This seminar is intended to give graduate students an overview of the historiography of the early
modern Ottoman Empire beginning roughly with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and ending
with the early nineteenth century. The readings selected represent a drop in the sea of a
very large subject. The course focuses on the Arab provinces and, to some degree, the
imperial center, at the expense of the Balkan provinces and relations with European and Muslim
powers, each of which could constitute a field in itself.

Intensive study of specific problems in the history of science. Topics vary from year to year, and students may therefore repeat the course for credit.

This is a two-quarter graduate seminar on any aspect of U.S. history during the long 19th century.

This year long interdisciplinary colloquium brings together graduate students who study Japanese history and culture. It introduces current scholarship on Japan via readings, discussions and presentations by visiting scholars, UCSB scholars and graduate students. The colloquium meets bi- weekly. Students will prepare readings for discussion, write a seminar-length paper and present their paper to the colloquium once during the year.

A seminar on selected problems in Chinese history. Topic needs to be arranged with the instructor before the start of Fall Quarter.

Fluency in ancient and modern Chinese, and all other relevant research languages required.  Must be willing to commit to the entire three-quarter sequence (289A, 289B, 204).

A colloquium introducing the important issues, themes, and literature in the history of the United States, from colonial origins to 1846. Historiographical in nature, the course assumes a basic familiarity with the period.

This year-long interdisciplinary colloquium brings together graduate students and UCSB scholars who study the histories of women, gender, or sexuality across time and space. It introduces students to current literature and contemporary debates through readings, discussion, and public presentations by visiting scholars, UCSB scholars, and graduate students. Participants will meet every other week. Preparation might include coordinating readings for discussion, writing a chapter/article for peer review, or presenting original research to colloquium members.

Writing/reading workshop, professionalization seminar, and guest lecture series for graduate students working in area of history of science/technology. Meets monthly throughout the academic year.