Spring 2025 Graduate Courses

Description of course content:

This course is designed to educate students in the methods and techniques of processing archives and historical manuscripts.  The course focuses on the day-to-day tasks of archivists:  appraising, accessioning, arranging and describing collections; producing effective finding aids to collections; administering and processing non-manuscript materials, such as oral history tapes, computer generated records, artifacts, and photographs; and preserving collections.  Writing news releases, creating social media and blog postings, transcribing documents and preparing outreach programs highlighting the collections will be included.  The course will use active learning techniques, and by the end of the semester, students will have processed at least one collection and promoted it.  Students enrolling in this course must have taken History 5342: Principles of Archives and Museums I. History 5342 and 5343 account for half of the hours needed to obtain the archival certificate offered through the Department of History and Geography.

James Sidbury, Becoming African in America

Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question

Alaina Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While

Natalia Molina, A Place at Nayarit

David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story

Max Krochmal, Blue Texas

Description of course content:

A map is an as valid mode of expression as a text – and often a good map tells a complex story much better than any lengthy text. To “crack the code” of maps, this course provides a general introduction into both the techniques of cartography and selected major topics in the course of its history. It provides a basic overview of the development of surveying, map making, and map use from ancient origins to 20th century technologies. In this online class, students will read and critically assess textbooks, work on several short assignments and write a course paper. By way of reading and hands-on assignments, students will learn how to assess a variety of map categories according to formal and contextual criteria.

This introduction class is a good preparation for advanced classes in the history of cartography!

Course Level Student Learning Outcomes:

After successfully completing this course, students will be able to:

1. identify the various elements and meanings of a cartographical item;

2. produce and exchange critical appraisals of course readings through synthesize cartographical information taken from the course readings and present this information clearly in concise, coherent, well-articulated, and well substantiated analytical and other assignments;

3. deconstruct the elements and meanings of cartography;

4. analyze the characteristics of different eras in map making and use from antiquity to the twentieth century. 

5. develop research and analytical skills by finding, creating, and interpreting primary source documents (e.g. maps) and secondary materials. 

Required Textbooks & Other Course Materials:

Kimerling, Jon & et al.:

Map Use.

Redlands (Esri) 2016. 8th edition. Available also as E-Book.

ISBN 978-1589484429 (paperback)

Schulten, Susan:

The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950.

Chicago (Chicago University Press) 2001.

ISBN 978-0226740560 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0226740553 (hardcover)

Thrower, Norman J.W.:

Maps & Civilization. Cartography in Culture and Society.

Chicago / London (University of Chicago Press) 3rd edition 2007. Available also as E-Book.

ISBN: 978-0226799742 paperback)

Wilford, John N.:

The Mapmakers.

New York (Vintage Books) 2nd edition 2001.

ISBN: 978-0375708503 paperback)

Additional readings and links to webpages as made available by the instructor.

Description of course content:

History and Historiography of Mexico. This course provides a broad thematic and chronological introduction to problems in Mexican history. Readings range among local, national, and transnational frames and include topics such as nationalism, race, technology, indigeneity, warfare, regionalism, commodity chains, public spectacle, and international relations. Successful completion of the course will enhance the student's ability to research topics related to the Mexican and to include new perspectives in the classroom.

Description of course content:

This research seminar will focus on methodological and historiographical approaches to investigating and writing about the experiences of women and/or how gender and sexuality have operated historically in shaping American society.  For the first three-four weeks, we’ll meet in person to read and discuss several articles, with an eye both to marking key historiographical developments and finding potential models for research essays. At the same time, we’ll discuss the use of various AI research tools and share knowledge about databases of digitized sources for use on potential topics.  Students will then formulate and undertake their own research projects based on available primary sources and informed by the ideas and methodologies of the historiography of one or more of these fields.

Tentative Reading List:

Brier, Jennifer, Downs, Jim, and Morgan, Jennifer L.  Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America. University of Illinois Press, 2016. ISBN 10: 0252081870  (Available used for $5.) 

Lussana, Sergio. “To See Who Was Best on the Plantation: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South.” The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (2010): 901–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27919283 .

HALL, KRISTIN. “Selling Sexual Certainty? Advertising Lysol as a Contraceptive in the United States and Canada, 1919—1939.” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 1 (2013): 71–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23701648

Description of course content:

This research seminar will focus on approaches to researching and writing about topics in the history of transnational radicalism, broadly defined. Students will begin by reading several recent works that represent varied topics and approaches and make use of different types of sources, methodologies, and geographical frameworks. They will then formulate and undertake their own research papers informed by the ideas, methods, and examples of these works, based upon original research in appropriate primary sources.

Tentative Reading List:

1. Niklas Frykman, The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution

2. Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America

3. Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism

4. Emily K. Hobson, Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left