HS 100 Course Descriptions
Why does history matter? HS 100 Encountering the Past explores why the study of the past is essential for understanding our present. Through the lens of a single historical topic that varies by instructor, students are introduced to what it means to think like a historian and weave compelling stories. Along the way, students learn to ask critical questions, to evaluate evidence, to make persuasive arguments, and to write clearly and cogently. The course introduces students to how and why histories are produced, but more than that, it sets out to provide new ways of thinking about the human experience and about our place in the world today.
Below you will find information about individual topics, sections and professors.
SPRING 2025
HS 100.01T (Messina Course) HS 100.02T (Messina Course HS 100.19)
Encountering the Past:
Legacies of Modern Empire
Far from being a relic of the ancient world, empires existed across the world well into the twentieth century, and some people would argue they still exist today. This course will explore the legacies of modern empire with a focus on two questions. How did colonial empires leave their mark on the contemporary world? And what were the consequences of the fall of modern empires and the rise of independent nation-states—a process sometimes called decolonization? Rather than taking a survey approach, we will investigate these questions through two case studies: Ghana, which gained its independence from the British Empire in 1957; and Puerto Rico, which remains an unincorporated territory of the United States. These very different cases are useful lenses for looking at how historians interpret the past, because they shed light on historical debates about what defines an empire, how (and whether) empires should be compared, and what happens when empires end. As we examine these debates, we will also discuss how the legacy of empire has influenced contemporary ideas about democracy, citizenship, migration, race, gender, and capitalism.
HS 100.03S (Messina Course), HS 100.12
Encountering the Past
The Taiping Rebellion
This section will focus on the causes and consequences of the “Taiping Rebellion”—the largest rebellion in human history—in China’s long nineteenth century. We will discuss, among other topics, nationalism, imperialism, religious rebellion, ethnicity and identity, and revolution through our critical engagement with text-based and visual primary and secondary sources.
HS 100.04S (Messina Course)
Encountering the Past:
Blackness in Ancient Greece and Rome: Representation and Interpretation
The course will examine how ancient Greeks and Romans encountered, represented, reacted to and interacted with peoples and individuals with dark skin. Primary source evidence for the class will include literary, documentary and large portions of visual evidence, including various art forms like sculpture, painting and mosaic. We will investigate in detail how later European and American scholars (from the 1800s to the present) have interpreted this evidence. These early interpretations established racist ways of viewing these populations and significantly influenced the creation of academic disciplines like Art History and Classics (the study of ancient Greeks and Romans). The last portion of the course will focus on two topics: 1. Contemporary critiques of these traditional approaches and new ways of approaching and studying the topic, and 2. The recent use and misuse in Western political discourse of the history of peoples in the ancient Mediterranean.
HS 100.05T (Messina Course)
Encountering the Past:
German Democracy to Nazi Dictatorship
This section focuses on Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s, a period that saw both Germany’s first democracy but also the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933. Rather than see this transition from democracy to dictatorship as inevitable, this course explores the various factors that came together to bring the Nazi Party to power, as well as how historians have interpreted and debated these factors. How did Germans experience the First World War and what were its legacies in the Weimar Republic that followed? Did economic crisis radicalize politics? What role did mass politics, elections, and propaganda play in this process? How did Germans mobilize ideologies to make sense of their lives and their aspirations? What did many Germans find attractive about the Nazi Party and, after 1933, about the Third Reich? How did the Nazi regime dismantle the institutions of democracy, and what did they create instead? In exploring these questions, we can consider the opportunities and challenges for democracy in our modern age.
HS 100.06T (Messina Course), HS 100.07T (Messina Course), HS 100.18
Encountering The Past:
The Middle East in Myth and Reality
This course will explore myths and realities about the Middle East. The term Middle East is loaded with implications, stereotypes, projections and clichés. Often defined as a “cradle of civilization,” the region has not only been the setting for premodern events and narratives of lasting impact upon the world at large; it has also been mythicized from outside like few other places in the modern era, and remains globally contested both in myth and in reality. In this course, students will be introduced to the Middle East as region where its real-life experiences often clash with past and present expectations and prejudices.
HS 100.08, HS 100.09
Encountering the Past:
The Jesuits in India 1542 to the Present: Their Lives, Their Times
This course examines how the Society of Jesus, barely two years old in Europe, established itself in India and in the East in 1542. Important Jesuits like St Francis Xavier and Father Alessandro Valignano marked their unique stamps on the way the men who would follow them would work in the mission lands. Other Jesuits who came in the succeeding centuries worked in the fields of local languages and cultures while striving at the same time to convert people to the Christian faith. The history of the Society of Jesus in India is closely linked to Indian social, political and cultural history. Thus while studying Jesuit history in India one becomes aware of how much Jesuits contributed to Indian history and in the process of the ways in which they were influenced in return
HS 100.10
Encountering the Past:
The Vikings
HS 100.11
Encountering the Past:
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in Africa
In this course, students will develop the skills necessary for understanding and producing histories, which include the critical evaluation of sources and the ability to write cogently and persuasively about events in the past. It also asks students to think about why the study of history is important to our lives today. We will engage these topics and questions by exploring the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery as a practice and institution in Africa. The development of this economic system was critical to the making of the modern world. We will explore the conditions that led to its development, consider the humanistic contradictions inherent in its evolution, the debates over abolition, and its legacy on our modern world.
HS 100.13
Encountering the Past:
A People's History of the Medieval Church
Common misconceptions about the European Middle Ages include stereotypes like “The Church controlled everything,” or “Medieval people were ignorant and superstitious.” While “the Church” exercised significant political, cultural, economic, intellectual, and social influences during the Middle Ages, it was far from a unified, all-powerful institution. The people who comprised the Church brought a range of different ideas, beliefs, practices, and agendas to the table. This course will explore the ways in which the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the medieval Church shaped and were shaped by society. And we’ll examine some of the ways in which historians have challenged assumptions or misconceptions about this vital aspect of medieval history.
HS 100.14
Encountering the Past:
The French Revolution
This section will use the French Revolution as our case study. The French Revolution was many things. An absolute monarchy was overthrown. An effort at democracy descended into terror. Women made new claims to citizenship. Enslaved people in Haiti overthrew their masters and founded an independent state. A European empire emerged that brought new hierarchies and the rule of law to other countries at the same time. The French Revolution thus proves an apt event with which to explore how historians debate and understand the past because the French Revolution offers to pat answers to the questions it raises: How should we organize our politics? Why have democracies struggled to ensure equity, especially for women and people of color? How is the law used to perpetuate inequality? By exploring how historians have debated the meaning of the French Revolution we will, turn, debate some of the most important questions facing us today
HS 100.15, HS 100.16
Encountering the Past:
The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
HS 100.17
Encountering the Past:
Slavery, Race, and the American University
In this section, students will think deeply about how slavery, race, and racism have shaped—and continue to shape—institutions of higher learning. How was slavery and the slave trade foundational to the creation and maintenance of America’s colleges and universities from the colonial period through the Civil War? How did ideas about race produced in the academy circulate to the broader public? How did the student movements of the late twentieth century challenge colleges and universities to reckon with racial past and create a more inclusive future? What are the roles and social responsibilities of universities in rectifying these issues in the present? Students will think deeply about how these histories shape current debates about educational policies and experiences—particularly of students of color—in institutions of higher education.
HS 100.20, HS 100.21, HS 100.22
Encountering the Past:
Atlantic Exchanges: Peoples, Goods, and Pathogens of the Early Modern World
In our course on Atlantic Exchanges we study the peoples, goods, and pathogens that freely and un-freely passed across the Atlantic Ocean from the late fifteenth century until the independence movements of the 1800’s. We examine how such exchanges among the four continents that surround the Atlantic basin of Africa, Europe, and North and South America, constitute a mutual age of discovery. By taking this transnational approach, we challenge the often Eurocentric narratives of these parts of the world and develop research questions about how these histories inform our understanding of current immigration, trade, and pandemics.