HIST 498

Spring 2014 All Classes

All Classes

Research and Writing Seminar

Credit: 3 hours.

Capstone course required of all majors. Students will make history by researching and writing a work of original scholarship. Several of these seminars are offered each term and each focuses on a special topic, thus allowing students with similar interests to work through the process of gathering, interpreting, and organizing historical evidence under the direction of an expert in the field. The topics on offer each semester will be listed in the Class Schedule and described in the department's course guide at http://www.history.illinois.edu.

No graduate credit. May be repeated to a maximum of 6 hours. Prerequisite: HIST 200 and junior standing, or consent of the Director of Undergraduate Studies; 15 hours in history or consent of instructor.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Advanced Composition

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HIST 498 class schedule data for spring 2014
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
32175	Discussion/ Recitation	A	2:00PM -3:50PM	M	221 Gregory Hall	Hitchins, K	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Info: Meets with HIST 495, Section: A. Topic: Empires: Mongols, Mughals, Ottomans. Description: We shall investigate empires through a comparative study of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mughal Empire in India, and the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and Southeastern Europe. We shall also give some attention to the Safavid Empire in Persia. Our main concerns will be the formation of empires, their armies and methods of warfare, their conquests and treatment of conquered peoples, their political and economic organization, their religious and legal institutions, especially Islamic, their relations with Europe, and their decline. Besides surveys of each empire, we shall inquire into the nature of empires in general from Roman times to the twentieth century and thus place our three case studies within this broad historical context in order to see how empire building evolved. There will be readings, discussions and a research paper. Restriction(s): Restricted to History major(s). Restricted to students with Junior or Senior class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
32178	Discussion/ Recitation	B	1:00PM -2:50PM	W	221 Gregory Hall	Levine, B	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Info: Meets with HIST 495, Section: B. Topic: Slavery, War, Emancipation. Description: This seminar will examine questions long debated by historians, including: How similar or different were the prewar North and South? What caused the Civil War? Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Was the Civil War inevitable? Could and should it have been avoided? How significantly did war and Reconstruction transform the United States? Why was Reconstruction eventually overturned? What were the lasting effects of the sectional conflict and its aftermath? Reading materials will include both original historical documents ("primary sources") and interpretative writings by historians ("secondary sources"). Restriction(s): Restricted to History major(s). Restricted to students with Junior or Senior class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
43311	Discussion/ Recitation	C	1:00PM -2:50PM	W	327 Gregory Hall	Fritzsche, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Info: Meets with HIST 495, Section C. Topic: The Life and Death of Civilians in World War II. Description: This course is designed to allow students to a write a substantial research or historiographical paper. To introduce the subject at hand, we will look at six thematic areas: the battle for food; the patriotic mythology around Britain's "People?s War," "choices" in German-occupied France; the "final solution" against Europe's Jews in Poland; the air war in Germany; and sex and rape at war's end. Diaries, reportages, novels, and films will supplement the secondary sources. Restriction(s): Restricted to History major(s). Restricted to students with Junior or Senior class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
32180	Discussion/ Recitation	D	3:00PM -4:50PM	R	221 Gregory Hall	Greenstein, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/21/14-05/07/14 Degree Notes: Advanced Composition course. Section Info: Meets with HIST 495, Section D. Topic: Sex and Terrorism in the United States and the World. Description: This course will examine the historical connections that intimately linked ideas about terrorism with ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. We will ask why notions of sex and gender have often been at the heart of both explanations for acts of radial violence and proposed solutions, how these relations changed over time, and what these intersections can tell us about the broader links between the history of sex and gender and the history of international relations. Drawing on tentative understandings of our key terms we will investigate examples of international and domestic terrorism, radical violence in social movements, and fear of state sanctioned violence and we will ask how distinctions between these categories were affected historically by notions of gender and sexual difference. With a focus centered in the history of these overlaps in the United States, we will also explore global sites in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere with a particular emphasis on transnational processes that carried collisions between sex and terrorism across national borders and regional divides. Assignments will emphasize work with a range of primary source materials including films, diplomatic texts, manifestos, and medical documents. Students will apply questions and approaches encountered in the course to their own research projects that broach boundaries between histories of gender and sexuality and histories of political violence. Restriction(s): Restricted to History major(s). Restricted to students with Junior or Senior class standing. Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.