WHAT DID IT MEAN TO BE BRITISH? At its peak, one fourth of the world’s population lived under the influence of the British empire. This class considers what life was like for British citizens and subjects as the empire transformed over the course of three centuries of connection, oppression, and anti-colonial resistance. We will pay particular attention to the ways that understandings of race, gender, and Britishness evolved in and were shaped by people’s experiences of imperialism over time and in different places.

Our class charts the British story from the mid-eighteenth century to the recent “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union. All the while, we will focus on the question of how both citizens and subjects negotiated what it meant and still means to be British, and on how the answer to this question has always been up for debate. In order to study such a vast history, we will read accounts of the making and un-making of empire written by or about individual people in an effort to understand how big historical forces – things like race, class, gender, capitalism, and imperialism – shape individual lives, and how individual people can shape big historical forces in turn.

At ISU, HIS 308.

WHY DOES NINETEENTH CENTURY HISTORY MATTER? The nineteenth century was defined by contests over power and to whom it belonged. It was a time of revolutions and restorations, major social and cultural changes, and the development of nations and empires. While it might seem distant to us now, the history of Europe in the nineteenth century fundamentally shaped the world we live in today. Liberalism and conservatism, socialism and imperialism, and modern racism and feminism all have their roots in this tumultuous century. Using approaches from social and cultural history, as well as political history, military history, and the history of technology, we will watch debates over power happen, and seek to understand their legacy.

This course also invites students to think about power in another way, and to consider the power that historians have to shape the way history is told. We will learn to analyze the evidence from which history is written, and to use that evidence to tell convincing, compelling stories that people want (and need) to hear. Throughout the semester we will learn from, analyze, and critically consider different wats to produce and share history with audiences outside the academic bubble of our college campus. Through their work, every student in this class will become a public historian and develop a final project that aims to educate members of the public about an important event, moment, or theme in nineteenth century history.

AT ISU, HIS 228.

This senior thesis writing seminar is the culmination of your scholarly career in the History Department – you will design, write, revise, and present a senior thesis on a topic that you choose related to the subject of our seminar. Through this process, you will become historians in your own right, produce new knowledge and arguments about the past, and engage in the collaborative process of research and writing. Together, we will focus on two big methodological areas: evidence (and the primary sources that contain evidence) and arguments (and the secondary sources that present them).

Our seminar (and your research papers) will focus on the social and cultural histories of nineteenth century empire. The politics of the nineteenth century were dominated by the rise of European empires around the globe, but empire also reached into the social and cultural worlds of everyday people. This seminar investigates the ways that empire shaped European’s own conceptions of themselves and will cover topics such as shifting understandings of race and gender, the development of colonial and metropolitan policing, representations of empire in exhibitions and literature, and empire’s influence on art, food, clothing, and more. We will also consider different theoretical approaches to the relationships that developed between colonized and colonizing places, and cover major debates in the field of imperial history. Students will research, develop, and write their own papers on a topic they choose related to the history of “everyday empire.”

At ISU, HIS 300.

This class is an introduction to doing history at the college level – we will focus on thinking critically about how history is written and remembered, interrogate the kinds of evidence historians use, and learn how to construct a historical argument. Our vehicle for developing these skills is the “western civilization” course – but “western civ” is a problematic narrative that is often told about the steady progress European peoples experienced throughout their history. We will question and interrogate this story by paying attention to moments when Europe failed to live up to this promise. We begin our course in about 1450 with the Italian Renaissance and trace the development of several major themes into the late 20th century. These themes include the relationship between religion and nationalism, the development of imperialism and the rise of the nation-state, the rise of urbanization and industrialization, and gender, war, and citizenship. All the while, we will critically consider the shifting ways Europeans understood themselves as “western” – often with the help of ideologies we still live with today, including gender, race, and “otherness.”

At ISU, HIS 102.

WHAT IS A WAR, AND WHO GETS TO DECIDE? This class explores images of war generated by historians, writers, artists, filmmakers, and journalists in order to consider what motivates representations of violence and conflict and how these images shape public and individual consciousness.

We will consider a range of 19th and 20th century wars and the debates that surrounded them in order to explore the difference between experience and remembrance, the role of politics, nationality, and gender in representations of war over time, and the effects of combat on those involved.

You will meet an English-Jamaican nurse who argued with Florence Nightingale, a group of young art students in London who must decide whether or not to serve in WWI, a UW student who fought and died for democracy in the Spanish Civil War, and veterans of America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The First and Second World Wars were human-made catastrophes that engulfed the globe and killed upwards of eighty million people, including tens of millions of civilians. Each war remade the world. Their aftershocks reverberate today and continue to shape global politics. This class explores the history of both wars, focusing on military technology, ethics, racism, empire, gender and sexuality, and social history. We will use digital methods to uncover and share stories from the wars that shaped the modern world. No prior tech experience needed.

Together we will (a) investigate the histories of World Wars I and II, introducing students to major narratives and questions along the way, and (b) use and evaluate digitized historical data and the data science and digital humanities tools that can be used to analyze and represent the World Wars to an audience outside of our class.

Learn more about this class (and see a syllabus and DH workshop instructions) by visiting the course website.