[Histmaj] Reminder: Junior and Senior Seminars for History Majors in Spring 2024

[HISTORY UNDERGRADUATE ADVISORS]

Good morning Historians-
If you intend to complete your History Major Junior Seminar or Senior Seminar requirement in Spring 2024, NOW is the time to ask for an add code.  We have given out most of the add codes for the offered Senior Seminars.  There are still openings in the Junior Seminars, but 60% of the total seats have been distributed.  See below of more information.
Included below are descriptions from the faculty of each Junior and Senior Seminar offered in Spring 2024 to help you make registration choices.  The Time Schedule is now active for the quarter (https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/SPR2024/), so you can look there, or in MyPlan for information about how these classes fit with others.  Remember that the Time Schedule is always subject to change.
For the best chance of success, students should have completed at least two 300-400 level History courses before taking HSTRY 388.
Students need to have taken HSTRY 388 before they are eligible to register in HSTRY 494 or 498.

If you want to add one of these courses, email the History Advisers (histadv at uw.edu<mailto:histadv at uw.edu>) to be given an add code or to be put on the waiting list.  Please remember to give clear information about which section you want to add, and also include your name and UW student number.  These classes fill VERY quickly, so request your add codes sooner, rather than later.  You do not have to wait for your registration period to ask, because the codes might all have been given out by that time.

Junior Seminars for Spring 2024:

HSTRY 388 A- sln: 15394; Prof. Susan Glenn, M 130-420 pm
"Jews and Blacks: Exploring Alliances and Conflicts in 20th Century America"
This course explores the varied, complex, and contradictory ways in which  African Americans and American Jews, two historically vulnerable groups,  have understood and imagined each other and interacted-both in alliance and solidarity and also in conflict-- in the years between 1915 and the 1990s. In this seminar we will examine the changing politics and polemics of "Jewish/Black relations" in the context of larger national and international developments, paying close attention to the significance of race, racism, and power differentials and dynamics at home and abroad. Our sources include the writings of activists, journalists, social scientists, cultural critics, playwrights, poets, and novelists as well as the work of visual artists and filmmakers.

HSTRY 388 B- sln: 15395; Prof. Bruce Hevly, MW 100-220 pm
Colloquium in the History of Science: "The Manhattan Project"
For this year's colloquium we will consider the Manhattan Project as a problem for historians of science.  The recent film Oppenheimer has raised some of the classic issues surrounding the events leading up to the use of nuclear weapons by the United States at the end of  World War II, and provides scope for research in history of science and technology, as well as environmental, political, and military history (at least).  For history of science, a central issue is the problem of biography -- individual and collective -- and by extension, so-called "physicists' histories" of the Manhattan Project.

HSTRY 388 C- sln: 15396; Prof. Julie Osborn, TTh 1100-1220 pm
"Reimagining the Seventies: Historiography, Historical Method and 1970s America"

The United States in the 1970s is often considered the twentieth-century's most forgettable decade, a footnote between the tumultuous 1960s and the Reagan revolution. When remembered, it is often considered an anomaly, an era characterized by its distinctive popular culture and aesthetic choices but not worthy of much academic inquiry. In this class we will join a small chorus of historians who have attempted to take the decade seriously, as it was a period marked by important political shifts, economic restructuring, meaningful conversations about "morality," religion and sex/gender and a backlash that swiftly met these new ideas.



In this course we will operate with a dual purpose. In addition to looking at the historical events of the decade and why they mattered, we will approach those events by carefully considering historical methods and historiographical approaches more broadly. Each week we will consider a set of events through particular historiographical frames, we will attempt to disentangle the threads, and to reassemble them, building to an individual research project that applies one of the historical methods  to some aspect of American history in the 1970s.



The goal of this 388 is to use the 1970s as our shared temporal home base but to bring in each student's individual interests in terms of methodology and subfield. Students are expected to read widely in assigned course readings and the research materials relevant to individual projects and execute and manage all stages of a research project, including the formulation of a sound historical argument. Students are also expected to participate actively in discussions, group work, and any online work that is assigned. The goal of this 388 is to deepen your understanding of what it means to practice history, think historically, generate cogent historical questions, and produce sophisticated historical writing that engages primary and secondary sources on a novel topic.





Senior Seminars for Spring 2024





HSTRY 494 A- sln: 15399; Prof. Vicente Rafael, M 330 pm-520 pm


"The American Empire in Comparative Perspective"
We will read some of the more recent scholarship that situates US national and imperial histories in relation to other imperial and postcolonial histories--for example, those of Spain, Britain, Native American and an emergent "Third World"--around such topics as imperial ideology, war, slavery and abolition, nationalism, settler colonialism and diplomacy; along the axis of race, gender and immigration. The goal of the course is to develop some ways of thinking critically and comparatively about the paradoxical nature of the United States as simultaneously an empire and a republic, at once peripheral and central to the spread and mutation of a certain "Western" civilization, a place founded on democratic institutions and ideas, yet sustained by undemocratic practices and ideologies.

HSTRY 498 A- sln: 15401; Prof. Jordanna Bailkin, T 130 pm-320 pm
"The Global History of Human Rights"
This course explores the history of the idea of human rights from the ancients to the present day. We will treat human rights not as an abstract philosophical concept, but as policies that emerge in specific historical contexts - from 15th-century Spanish debates about whether Native Americans were rights-bearing subjects to 21st-century controversies about organ trafficking. We will move through the histories of colonial expansion and contraction, war, revolution, migration, and transformations of global capital that have shaped thought and practice about human rights. We will survey the many sites and actors that have participated in human rights debates, from courts to grassroots organizations, and conflicts that have emerged over humanitarian interventions. Finally, we will consider how modern states have acted both as protectors and as violators of human rights. The course is designed to help us understand the relationship between ethics and historical studies, and the ways in which particular narratives about rights can have profound - even life and death - consequences.

HSTRY 498 B- sln: 15402; Prof. Mark Letteney, W 1030 pm-1220 pm
"Writing the History of the Prison"
In this class, we will read books which attempt to write the history of the prison - both the history of the institution of "the prison," and histories of specific prisons in the ancient, medieval, and modern world. We will focus on understanding how historians use disparate forms of evidence to make their claims, from architecture to letters to interviews to art depicting prisoners, and by them. Each week we will read one major study tracing carceral history, and by the end of the quarter students will produce a prison history of their own, focused on a period or location of their choosing.

Sincerely, Mark and Tracy
Mark Weitzenkamp and Tracy Maschman Morrissey
History Undergraduate Advising
University of Washington
Smith Hall 315
Box 353560
Seattle, WA 98195
vm: 206.543.5691<tel:206.543.5691> fax: 206.543.9451<tel:206.543.9451>
depts.washington.edu/history<http://depts.washington.edu/history>

Please click here to schedule an advising appointment! [outlook.office365.com]<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/UWHistoryAdvising@cloud.washington.edu/bookings/__;!!K-Hz7m0Vt54!hepl5zsGyNtp8irH6BFU_vfzEDAVByBQeKGrA21TwwYy6eG5HGMceoCxsf_yemPn_ZqlOYzhtiOUSeGhRg$>

[follow us on social media]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/histmaj/attachments/20240202/2ae69156/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 11411 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/histmaj/attachments/20240202/2ae69156/attachment.jpg>