HISH - History Honors

The term “discovery” is an ambivalent and charged word when discussing the arrival, military occupation and colonization of the Americas during the late 15th and 16th 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 16th century, when a New World — a world still in formation — was born.

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.

Western civilization has a duel intellectual heritage: the secular, derived from Greek philosophy and drama, and the sacred, derived from Judeo-Christian religion. This course will introduce honors students to this duel heritage by readings and discussions of seminal texts.

The stories of immigration to America by peoples from Asia, Europe and Latin America — whether in history, fiction or film — examine the motives for leaving homeland and family, the experience of newcomers and the process of assimilation into an evolving American culture over time. While the stores have similarities in outline, there are significant cultural differences for each people. This course will examine the immigrant experience of the Chinese, the Jews and the Mexicans, using a major work of history, a novel and three films for each group.

In the 1920s, Paris became the center of an avant garde artistic and cultural community that demonstrated the profound impact of World War I, and has, in turn, shaped art and culture to the present. This course uses period poetry and fiction, memoir, biography and film to evoke the lives and contributions of select iconic figures: poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; painters Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali; composer Igor Stravinsky, dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and producer Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russes; fashion entrepreneur Coco Chanel; and jazz sensation Josephine Baker.

Comparative study of drama and society in Periclean Athens and Elizabethan London.

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.