HIST 398 Fall 2025
Fall 2025
HISTORY 398: UNDERGRADUATE SEMINARS
History majors are required to take an Undergraduate Seminar in History/ HIST 398. Fall registration is therefore restricted to History Majors only through the first two weeks of registration before opening to all students on Monday, April 7th.
HIST 398.001 DR. MICHAEL MORGAN MONDAY & WENDESDAY 3:35 – 4:50 PM
COLD WAR SUMMITS
At key moments of the Cold War, world leaders met face-to-face to try to solve international crises and lay the foundations for peace. In some cases they succeeded, in others they failed. Regardless of the outcome, each of these meetings – from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War – had profound consequences for the course of international politics. This seminar examines the most consequential summit meetings of the postwar era and considers the potential and the limits of diplomacy at the highest level.
HIST 398.003 DR. DONALD REID TUESDAY & THURSDAY 3:30 – 4:45 PM
RESISTANCE
The eighteenth-century Huguenot Marie Durand, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for her refusal to renounce her Protestant faith, scratched RESISTER on the wall of her cell with a knitting needle. In December 1940, partisans in occupied Paris launched one of the first underground newspapers. A member of the group recalled this inscription and they named their paper Résistance.
Resistance is perhaps the most powerful word in the contemporary political vocabulary. Historians have often used it, without thinking how it could serve as a concept of historical analysis to enable them to better interpret a diversity of collectivities. As a class, students will develop and refine over the course of the semester a working concept of resistance that they will use in their research. Research projects for this class can be on collectivities in any time or region of the world, which use of concept of resistance helps us better understand.
Students may study self-identified resistance, like that in Occupied France, opposition to school desegregation in Virginia in the 1950s, or opposition to the draft during the Vietnam War. Or students may choose groups that did not speak of resistance and/or for which historians have not used the term, if students can make the case that using the concept of resistance will allow us to develop new understandings of the history of the groups in question. Such projects may in turn help us understand otherwise unrecognized facets of resistance as an analytical concept. Resistance is a social, cultural and political commitment and practice. It forms a network of complicities, of responsibilities and initiatives. Resistance invariably involves a degree of spontaneity. As Olivier Wieviorka said of French resisters during World War II, they made it up as they want along. They were not quite ready for prime time, until they were. This will be our mantra too.
HIST 398.004 DR. MARCUS BULL TUESDAY 2:00 – 3:15 PM
SEEING THE PAST
The value that we attach to seeing something for ourselves, and then being able to describe what we have seen to others, is central to our culture. Seeing is the privileged form of sensory perception and consequently a common metaphor for understanding itself: “I see what you mean,” we say, or “My view on this has changed.”
In the criminal legal process, great weight is attached to eyewitness testimony, whereas convictions based only on hearsay are rightly considered unsound. Eyewitness is also a key criterion for how historians evaluate their primary sources and arrange them in hierarchies of importance: in the history books and articles that you have read, you will doubtless have come across numerous comments to the effect that such-and-such a source is reliable because its author was present at the events recorded in it, while another source is of lesser significance because it is second hand.
This course seeks to unpick the idea of eyewitnessing in order, ultimately, to think about how historians go about their research, and how they evaluate their sources. What is an eyewitness? What is an eyewitness source? And what exactly is an eyewitness source a source for? The examination of key theoretical issues will be complemented by the in-depth study of a number of primary texts that have an eyewitness or autobiographical component. These texts cover a diverse chronological and geographical range, from the central medieval period to the early twentieth century, and from Europe, Asia and America. These in-class set texts have been chosen as illustrative samples of the many more “ego texts,” as they are sometimes called, that are available to you for further study. They provide opportunities for practising skills of close reading and the framing of questions that can then be transferred to other sources. There are no chronological or geographical limitations to students’ choice of the ego text or texts on which they should base their research project.
HIST 398.005 DR. ANTWAIN HUNTER TUESDAY & THURSDAY 12:30 – 1:45 PM
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
The institution of slavery looms large in the United States’ past, as it had a profound impact on the country’s social, economic, and political dynamics. In this course, students will explore the history of enslavement and learn how historians have grappled with this challenging topic through a series of primary and secondary sources. We will focus primarily on the eighteenth and nineteenth century South.
As the centerpiece to this course, each student will write a 20-25 page research paper on a topic related to American slavery. These papers will be well-crafted, thoroughly researched, and high quality – in previous years, especially motivated students have published their research in undergraduate journals or won research awards. Each student’s interests will pull them to research different themes, like families and communities, resistance, politics, abolitionism, gender, labor, or military experiences. They will conduct original archival research, much of it independently. Most of them will find that the Southern Historical Collection, located at the Wilson Library right here on our campus offers a wide array of useful archival sources.
HIST 398.006 DR. ERIK GELLMAN TUESDAY & THURSDAY 9:30 – 10:45 AM
THE GREAT DEPRESSION IN AMERICA
When writer Richard Wright wrote in the 1930s about his state of “hunger,” he was describing both the physical hunger of hard economic times and his broader ambition to change himself and American society.
This course will assess the imagined and real possibilities for change during the Depression, evaluate New Deal reforms, and address the legacy Depression-era Americans made on institutions and succeeding generations. It will do so by interrogating an array of interdisciplinary primary and secondary sources. Weekly topics will include the expansion of the federal government, the rise of an industrial labor movement, the response of businesses, the evolution of African American protest, musical and artistic production that reshaped popular culture, and the paradox of new gender roles alongside stricter gender norms.
Students will survey different approaches to and problems in the study of these subjects. They will also contribute to this robust scholarly conversation themselves ¿ the written assignments will all build toward an original research paper whose foundation is primary source material. Students will work closely together as they critique and support each other in research and writing and learn about the tumultuous history of America in the 1930s.