Seminar Topics - Spring 2027
The following courses are seminar topics for Spring 2027. Topics will vary semester to semester. A course may be repeated if the selected topic is different.
History 300: Senior Seminar
Section 1: Reconstruction
Instructor: Dr. Ron Gifford
This course will provide an opportunity to analyze primary sources in relation to one of the most important eras in U.S. History. While Eric Foner provided in 1988 the most memorable comprehensive synthesis of the period, there is still room for interpretation, as you will see in the discussion of historiography since the 1990s. Students can choose to write about emancipation, race, labor, republicanism, the role of the executive, violence, corruption, agency, the freedmen, and hundreds of other topics wherein we see the country grappling with the outcome and meaning of the Civil War.
Section 2: Lady Science
Instructor: Dr. Nathan Kapoor
In this seminar students will explore the twisted and wandering history of the relationship between women, gender, and "natural knowledge."
Section 3: Medicine in the Civil War Era
Instructor: Dr. Megan VanGorder
This seminar explores how the breakthroughs and shortcomings of Civil War era medical care shaped society in lasting ways. Topics include battlefield care, women’s nursing, the work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, doctors’ professionalization, veterans’ struggles with pain and addiction, grief and mourning, and Black public health after emancipation. Students will engage primary sources and scholarship to develop original research projects at the intersection of war, race, gender, and medicine.
Section 4: Victorian Pastimes, Victorian Politics
Instructor: Dr. Taylor Soja
The Victorian world was one of contradiction. It was an era of empire-building and colonial war. Its politics were defined by the rise of racism, the challenge of nationalism, and gendered and classed conflict. At the same time, the Victorian world was one of leisure and pastimes. The nineteenth century gave us the modern novel and the music hall, the camera and the scrapbook. It saw a sharp rise in literacy that led to obsessive letter and diary-writing practices. As the violence of empire expanded their world, people took up hobbies and played sports; they traveled the world and even went “slumming.” How to explain these ironies?
This section of HIS 300 invites you to answer this question. Using Milner Special Collections to investigate the pastimes that occupied everyday people, we will ask not only where and how politics happens, but also who participates in it.
History 308: Selected Topics in European History
Section 1: The French Revolution and Napoleonic Era
Instructor: Dr. Tony Crubaugh
The French Revolution of 1789 shocked contemporaries, simultaneously generating wonder in the ability of humankind to alter the world for the better while provoking fear that god's established order was being threatened. This seminar will explore the nature of the "old regime" that French revolutionaries sought to overthrow; the origins of the Revolution as well as its essential (and contested) principles; the nature of the revolutionaries' increasing radicalism; the reasons why it was so difficult to "stop" the Revolution; the complex gender and racial dynamics of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras (including the abolition and reinstatement of slavery and the Haitian Revolution); the ways that Napoleon Bonaparte embodied and/or overturned revolutionary ideals; and the legacy of the Revolution that explains why it is generally considered to have ushered in "modern" history.
History 309/409: Topics In United States History
Section 1: Civil War, 1861-1865
Instructor: Dr. Ron Gifford
This topics course will select a variety of lenses--nationalistic, local, African-American, Women, military, cultural, and environmental--to analyze the US Civil War. The goal is to explore the choices that historians make, how those approaches affect the portrait of the war that emerges, and ultimately how they can lead us to new areas of exploration.
History 412: Seminar: Topics in 19th Century U.S. History
Section 1: Economic History
Instructor: Dr. Stewart Winger
Was slavery responsible for the rise of the US Economy as the so-called “New” Historians off “Capitalism” now contend? Was it so-called “free” markets that made America great? Or has American devotion to free markets and market capitalism been the precise problem? Was it the rise of the Alfred Chandler’s “visible hand,” ‘the corporate organizational form? Was it U.S. political and legal institutions? A recent book by prominent econometric historians now argues that it was egalitarian democratic governing institutions, of all things, that made Canada and the US North uniquely prosperous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
What was the source of the gradual rise of the U.S. North (and Canada) to world economic dominance over the course of the nineteenth century, overtaking the British, French, and German empires before the First World War? Is “capitalism” actually a thing? Is America the land of capitalism?
History 478: Seminar: Topics In Global History
Section 1: From Los Alamos to Fukushima and beyond
Instructor: Dr. Patrice Olsen
This seminar is designed to introduce students to the study of nuclear weapons and their proliferation, nuclear strategy, and environmental and political problems emanating from the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Often these issues are framed as problems between the United States and the Soviet Union, set in the Cold war, with “rogue” states on occasions seeking to develop such weapons, jeopardizing delicate strategic balances. Such an approach denies agency to other states and non-state actors, particularly in developing countries. Such approach also fails to acknowledge global dimensions of issue in the development, deployment, and control of these weapons. This seminar seeks to aid students in developing an understanding of complex global and transnational issues involving the development, deployment, and control of nuclear weapons, and national security strategies such as deterrence, mutually assured destruction, and pre-emption. This course also provides students with the opportunity to gain further understanding of the political, cultural, social, and environmental impacts of these weapons, as well as of the derivative nuclear power. Contemporary issues in US national security policy, WMDs, proliferation, and the environment will also be studied. At the heart of our inquiries will be the inherent paradox of nuclear weapons, as opportunity and threat – as guarantor of security and threat to security.