What is military history today? Is it traditional “drum-and-bugle” or “operational” history, which examines how wars are fought and won on the battlefield? Or is it what’s called the “new military history” (though it’s not so new anymore), often also known as the study of “war and society,” the more appropriate focus? Despite its title, this course doesn’t take a side in this debate, but is instead premised on the notion that both approaches are equally valid but not always equally relevant; and upon the notion that students of American history don’t always give proper attention to the important influence of military affairs on other aspects of U.S. history (women’s suffrage? civil rights? immigration? suburbanization? Yes to all of the above). In studying the broader course of the history of the modern United States, and how it has been significantly shaped by the military and warfare, this MPhil option aims to give students a better awareness of the capaciousness of military history and, with it, a better understanding of some of the most exciting trends in American historiography.

Students should bear two things in mind. First, this is not your grandfather’s military history (or even your dad’s). For the most part, we won’t be studying battles, weapons, tactics, or diplomatic negotiations, though of course those subjects will at times be relevant. We’ll instead be focusing on how the military (as an institution) and war (as an event and as a process), as well as ideas about them both, have helped shape American society, be it on political, racial, cultural, economic, and/or gendered terms. We’ll also consider Americans’ relationship with the phenomenon of war since 1917 and the extent to which American life has become militarized in the eras of the Cold War and the post-9/11 “forever wars.” Second, for these reasons and more, but most notably the locus of recent historiographical innovation, we’ll be focusing a much more on the Vietnam War era and its aftershocks than on the two world wars, and we won’t be focusing much at all on the recent “forever wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. So if the Vietnam War era doesn’t interest you all that much, this probably isn’t the course for you.

As spaces of myth and reality, frontiers and borderlands conjure visions of freedom and adventure that co-mingle with legacies of bloodshed, resource competition, ethnogenesis, and contested governmental authority. This MPhil option will examine zones of contact, conquest, and colonization in North America ca. 1600 to 1900, a period that witnessed the unlikely growth of a continental nation from a handful of coastal enclaves, the rapid spread of invasive settler communities, and the decline of the Indigenous population to its lowest levels on record. These sweeping changes have served as a backdrop for studies investigating issues ranging from the structure of power to environmental change, the production of cultural memory, the history of violence, the nature of political development, the varieties of slavery, the roles of race, gender, and class in shaping the lives of individuals and communities, and more. Readings will focus primarily on recent scholarship as we survey where the field has been and where it is going. Our goals will be to assess how historians have grounded the study of American frontiers and borderlands, trace how their findings have altered broader narratives about the American past, grapple with the relationship between place and process, and consider the implications of these lessons for future research. 

This course will explore the historiography of the African Atlantic world. We will think about how historians have used different sources and methodologies to access processes of diaspora and commercial, intellectual, and political exchange in the Atlantic World between 1500 and 1850.  We will think about themes in ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘imperial’ historiographies, as well as the tendencies toward historiographical nationalism in discussions of diaspora. The paper will be grounded in West and West Central Africa, examining how that perspective shapes US, Caribbean, European, and Latin American histories.

What do historians gain by approaching the body as historically contingent and with its own material logic? In this course we consider several different ways of assessing the body historically. Our readings will explore how new social, racial, economic and political formations influenced how contemporaries imagined and described bodies and their capacities. We will also explore whether the body itself might be a dynamic source of historical change. Among the topics we will discuss are: medical theories about bodies; epidemics and their impact; sensory capacities; forced migrations; expectations for physical labor; cultures of violence; incarceration; reproductive capacities and politics; fashion, beauty, and grace; and the state's biopolitical interests in having bodies serve imperial, economic, scientific, and military agendas. Although many of the readings will focus on the early modern Atlantic, early North America, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, students will be responsible for developing a robust comparative perspective through supplemental readings about China, Sudan, the Congo, Iran, France, Australia, the U.S. occupied Philippines, and the period of British rule in India.