GRADUATE

History 7650: Studies in World History
Instructor: Roth, Randolph Anthony
Days/Times: W, 7:00PM-9:45PM
Session: 8-week Session 2

Description
This section of Studies in World History is an 8-week course on the scholarship on World History since 1880. Our course will focus on changes in the quality of life, broadly construed, over the last century and a half, and will engage critically historical and theoretical debates about the causes and consequences of violence, nationalism, revolutions, imperialism, economic development, state building, economic catastrophes (including the Great Depression and the Great Recession), environmental change, inequality, changes in human health and health care, and changes in racial, ethnic, religious, class, and gender relations and identities. The course will also focus on strategies for critical reading and for questioning the authority of historical texts. The goal is to encourage students to arrive at their own considered interpretations of historical events.

History 7650 is a synchronous online hybrid course. It will include one in-person evening class each week on Carmen ZOOM and two individual meetings with the instructor, but it will also include assignments online, comprised of short readings and written responses to weekly prompts on the readings. The purpose is to keep in-person hours to a minimum during the summer, so you can conduct research or prepare for your general examinations. Yet it will offer the same content and contact hours as a typical 3-credit graduate class.

The course is designed to help you prepare to teach global history and place you research and course work on modern history in global perspective.

Readings

Students will be asked to read six books in common, which will be announced at a later date. Students will also read several short essays on Carmen and two books of their choice by arrangement with instructor—books that speak to their personal and professional interests. Also, please feel free to write to me in advance if you’d like to share your particular interests, as I haven’t yet decided on all of the books we’ll read in common.

The common books may include (for instance):

Edward Dickinson, The World in the Long Twentieth Century: An Interpretive History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0520285552

David L. Hoffman, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7974-8

Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses and Mis-Uses of History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0190621070

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. New York: Norton, 2017. ISBN-13: 978-0393355161.

James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War, 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-1-1076-1354-6. Paperback.

Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, rev. ed., 1998. ISBN-13: 978-0231106511. Paperback.

Dawn Langan Teele, Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women’s Vote. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN-13: 978-0691180267.

Jan Vansina, Being Colonized: The Kuba Experience in Rural Congo, 1880–1960. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0299236441

Myint-U, Thant, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. ISBN-13: 978-1324003298

Assignments

Discussion and Attendance (20% of grade)

Responses to on-line readings (25% of grade)

Notes (25% of grade): You will be asked to take three or four pages of careful notes (double spaced) on an article or chapters of a book of your choice that is not required reading for the course.

Essay (30% of grade): You will be asked to write a five-page critical paper on one of the historical and theoretical debates we will study in the class.

Notes

Please contact the professor (Roth.5@osu.edu) in advance if you’d like to share your particular interests for the course, as the full readings have not yet been set.