HIST-2806

Offered: Fall 2016; Fall 2017; Fall 2019; Fall 2020; Fall 2021; Fall 2022; Fall 2023; Fall 2025 (planned) 

Born in 1775 as a loose confederation of small colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast of North America, the United States rose to a position of world superpower over the course of 170 years. How can we account for this remarkable development in world history? While we tend to take an exclusive look at the United States to understand its history, we cannot understand its evolution without understandings its complex and multilayered interactions with the rest of the world. In this course, we will explore how the United States’ security environment, government capabilities, economic interests, social changes, and cultural forces changed over time and, combined together, powerfully shaped the shifting course of U.S. foreign relations through 1945. We will also examine how the United States developed and exercised hard power, soft power, and economic power in achieving its key policy objectives. The key events covered in the course include: the American Revolution, the War of 1812, territorial expansion, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the entry into the China market, and the two world wars. In examining these events, we will ask: What drove U.S. foreign policy? Why did the United States go to war? How did it make peace? Was the United States isolationist before 1945? If not, what was it?

HIST-2807

Offered: Spring 2016; Spring 2017; Spring 2018; Spring 2019; Spring 2020; Spring 2022; Spring 2023; Spring 2024; Spring 2026 (planned) 

Born in the late 18th century as a loose confederation of small colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America, the United States emerged from the Second World War as an unparalleled superpower. In this course, we will explore how America’s security environment, government capabilities, economic interests, social changes, and cultural forces changed since 1945 and, combined together, powerfully shaped the changing course of U.S. foreign policy over the last seven decades. We will also examine how the United States has been exercising hard power, soft power, and economic power in achieving key policy objectives. We will closely examine some of the key events, such as: the origins of the Cold War; the Korean War; the nuclear arms race; decolonization; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Vietnam War; the Sino-US rapprochement; the détente; a major shift in world economy; human rights; the end of the Cold War; the Gulf War; the Yugoslav Wars and other ethnic conflicts; neoliberalism; 9/11 and the War on Terror; and George W. Bush’s legacy that casts a long shadow on today’s foreign policy issues. 

INAF 100-21

Offered: Fall 2016; Fall 2017; Fall 2019; Fall 2020; Fall 2021; Fall 2022

This course is an introduction to the historical development of U.S. relations with East Asia from the 18th century to the end of the Cold War. Arriving at the Pacific coast through westward territorial expansion and maritime access to the China market, the United States initially entered East Asia as an outside power. Unlike many European countries, however, U.S. relations with East Asia quickly extended to all dimensions of social life through the trans-Pacific exchanges of people, goods, and ideas. These interregional interactions beneath and beyond the governmental levels reflected and also reinforced government policies and geopolitical events such as wars and treaties. This mutual constitution of the "political" and the "social" integrated the United States into East Asia as its full member. In this course, we will seek to understand the close linkage between inter-governmental and inter-social relations, and between "hard" and "soft" power, behind the rise of the United States as a Pacific power. A geographical focus will be placed on the region's core (China, Japan, and Korea), but will be also extended to other parts of the Pacific world to situate America's growing regional presence in a larger context.

HIST-397 (Offered every other year) 

Offered: Spring 2021; Spring 2023

The Cold War dominated world politics for 45 years, and its many legacies continue to shape the contemporary world. Scholars, students, policymakers, politicians, and others often look to the history of the Cold War for lessons to guide current policies. This course will examine the origins, persistence, and end of the Cold War, explore its key legacies, and analyze the lessons different groups draw from its history.

HIST-523

Offered: Spring 2021; Fall 2024

This seminar explores recent research on the history of imperialism in the Pacific world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on oceanic (“terraqueous”), comparative, and inter-imperial perspectives to the evolution of two Pacific empires: the United States and Japan. Nineteenth-century topics to be examined will include how European exploration transformed indigenous societies and natural environments, as well as how European and American desire for products such as whale oil and sea-bird droppings (guano), along with Chinese desire for products such as otter pelts and sandalwood, further altered the relationship between humans and the ocean. We will also examine travels and migrations and the impact of American and Japanese imperialism on insular and coastal societies. In the years following World War II, the United States brought former Japanese territories under its control and consolidated a new form of empire in the Pacific. Although the readings range widely, we will visit and revisit a few key sites in the history of these two Pacific empires: Okinawa and Hawaii, Taiwan and the Philippines, metropolitan Japan and the west coast of North America.

HIST-790 (Offered every other year)

Offered: Spring 2022; Spring 2024; Spring 2026 (planned) 

This graduate seminar explores the frontiers of historical research on US foreign relations (“the US in the World”), with a focus on the watershed events that have defined American experience from the Revolution to 9/11. Some of the major topics to cover in the course include: isolationism, internationalism, and unilateralism; settler colonialism, extraterritoriality, and globalization; state-building, regionalism, and national identity formation; capitalism, modernity, and development; the imperial formation of class, race, and gender in American society; and liberalism, militarism, and the securitization of the American way of life.The objective of the seminar is to critically examine US history in its international, transnational, and global contexts.