HISH - History Honors

This course examines the British rule in India as a case study of how imperial rule is imposed and maintained, and the Indian independence movement as a model of colonial resistance.  It then examines the different imperial systems imposed on Africa, the struggle by African colonies for self-determination, and their search for identity and stability after independence.

This course examines China’s revolutionary century with a particular emphasis on four definitive events: the Boxer Rebellion (1900), the Communist revolution (1934-1949), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and the 1989 Democracy Movement. It explores both the cause and course of these revolutions, how they become embedded in cultural memory and the ways in which they shaped state-society power relationships.

The term “discovery” is an ambivalent and charged word when discussing the arrival, military occupation and colonization of the Americas during the late 15^th and 16^th centuries. Who discovered whom in 1492 and what were the economic, demographic, ecological, political and cultural consequences brought about by the New World/Old World encounter? How were Europe and the Americas transformed by this seminal event, and how were the foundations of modern Latin America (and modern Western civilization) laid during this fascinating period? These questions and many others will be studied and analyzed through exposure to the primary texts and artifacts of that era, in an attempt to understand the Spanish and Indigenous mindset on the eve of Conquest and their mutual transformation throughout the 16^th century, when a New World — a world still in formation — was born.

This course covers both traditional and modern China and Japan. It examines why and how have Chinese and Japanese men and women created, accepted, defended, revised, or resisted various gender roles as well as how have gender constructions shaped ideas and patterns of education, sexuality, marriage, family, and work.