Course descriptions
The following courses are offered for only the 2025-26 terms. This page is currently being updated, please check back for the new descriptions.
Regular course descriptions, prerequisite requirements and additional notations are found in the Undergraduate Calendar.
Summer 2025
HIST 398/CA - American Capitalism
This course examines the history of capitalism and its relation to the making of the United States from the 15 th century to the present. We will trace the formation of “American capitalism” from its origins as a network of settler and extractive colonies in the Americas and its expansion as a continental and global empire. Different intertwining histories of enslavement, accumulation, dispossession, extraction, production, speculation, and consumption will be explored. We will pay particular attention to how and why “American capitalism” was produced and reproduced in and through material relation of power based on hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and religion. The readings will draw from multiple historiographies and fields, including the Black radical tradition, women of color and Third World feminisms, queer of color critique, and Indigenous decolonization.
HIST 498 - Advanced Topics in History: Oral History & Creative Practice
Please note, you must apply for this course. You can find more information here.
Fall 2025
All History undergraduates take the introductory HIST 200, a first-year seminar that takes a deep dive into a historical subject.
HIST 200/A - Murder in Medieval England
The medieval period of European history is often conceptualized as an especially violent age. In this introductory seminar we will use our enquiries into a series of murders in late medieval England as an entry point for learning how to read and analyze historical evidence; how to read scholarly interpretations critically; and how to communicate ideas effectively in oral and written form.
HIST 200/B - Asian North American History
This course is an introduction to the transnational histories of Asians in North America. Diasporas to be examined include Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, South Asian, and Southeast Asian communities. By beginning in the late eighteenth century and looking beyond the official national borders of what is now Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the course will trouble the traditional North American immigrant narrative and the model minority myth. We will explore how Asian diasporas constituted, and were constituted by, histories of global capitalism and labor, imperial rivalries, North American states’ foreign policy, struggles over decolonization and self-determination, international social movements, and cross-racial politics. Finally, this course will examine how histories of Asian diasporas were shaped by, and simultaneously challenged, regimes based on gender, sexuality, religion, disability, and class.
HIST 200/C - Historical Biography: Writing the Lives of People and other Animals
If everyone is a creature of history, then all history is animal history. In recent decades, more historians have begun investigating how relationships between human and non-human beings—from microorganisms to megafauna—have inextricably shaped the past and present of societies around the world. Students in this introductory-level seminar will learn some of the basic skills and practices of doing history by exploring how non-human animals shaped the human past. More specifically, we will approach this question through the genre of historical biography—or, more accurately, prosopography—applied to interspecies lives, i.e. through the history of specific people and the animals or animal communities they associated with (pets, pests, livestock, wild animals, celebrity animals, ‘lab rats,’ mythical or fictional animals, etc). Alongside studying examples of human and non-human historical scholarship, students will be guided through the stages of researching and writing a historical biography of an individual non-human animal (living or dead) or a collective biography of a particular non-human animal community in a specific time and place.
HIST 208 - Introduction to the History of the Balkans
This course surveys the history of Europe through the Balkans (a region consisting of present-day Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Montenegro, Kosovo/Kosova, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia), from the premodern period to the present day. Emphasis is placed on the cultural diversity of the region and its impact on peace and conflict. Topics include the rise and fall of empires, economic change, religious transformation, violence, and the impact of ideologies such as nationalism, democracy, fascism, and communism.
HIST 242 - History of the Middle East
This course surveys the history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present. It traces broadly the formation of an Islamic World over a millennium and follows its engagements with modernity, examining closely the shift from the overarching paradigm of the multi-ethnic/multilinguistic Ottoman Empire to that of the mono ethnic/monolinguistic modern nation state. This course covers the political history of the region including the experience of British and French colonialism, the rise of nationalist movements, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and focuses on its social, intellectual, and cultural history.
HIST 251 - History of the United States to the Civil War Era
This course surveys American history from the period preceding European contact to the aftermath of the Civil War. It will focus particularly on the encounter between Indigenous North Americans, Africans and Europeans in the Atlantic basin, and the imprint that this encounter left on the political, social, cultural and religious character of the United States. Topics covered may include: slavery and the origins of racism, the rise and fall of the First British Empire, the forging of American nationalism, the growth of democratic politics and spread of reform movements, the rise of industry, and the causes and conduct of the American Civil War.
HIST 262 - History of China
A survey of China’s history from earliest times to the modern era.
HIST 263 - History of Japan
This course surveys Japan’s history from earliest times to the modern era. In addition to tracing political developments, it explores other themes such as the changing role of the samurai in history and the evolution of Japanese art, literature, and popular culture.
HIST 264 - History of Africa
This course is an introductory survey of the history of Africa from the earliest times to the present. Together we will trace the complex social, political, cultural and economic processes that have shaped the continent’s varied history. African history is one that has been entwined with, and critical to, world history in fundamental ways, but this centrality has too often been disavowed. In addition to examining the major phenomena of the African historical experience – including the development of pre-colonial kingdoms and trans-Saharan trade, the Atlantic slave trade, European imperial conquest, the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the victories of independence, and more recent challenges such as the anti-apartheid struggle – we will explore how varied groups of African women and men, peasants and workers, rulers and ruled, lived these changes.
HIST 281 - Film in History
This course examines how selected commercial films interpret historical events or provide insight into the politics, society, and culture of the times in which they were produced. The course is designed to help develop critical skills for the understanding of film in an historical framework.
HIST 285 - Introduction to Law and Society
Law influences all aspects of life in society, from resolving conflicts to structuring family or commercial relationships to controlling crime to allocating property. This interdisciplinary course examines the roles law plays in Canada and internationally, from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Cross listed with POLI/ANTH/SOCI 285.
HIST 298/A - Enviornmental History
Environmental conflicts, 'green' activism, and popular and scientific alarm over species extinctions, climate change, and the exhaustion of natural resources are global phenomena. This class will help you understand these issues in historical perspective over the long term, from the last ice age to the present. We will survey some of the major themes and problems in interactions between human societies and their environments in the past, considering changes in climates, landscapes, and biological communities of microorganisms, plants, and animals in many places around the world. Topics include ideas about nature, climate history, the environmental consequences of colonization, disease environments, agricultural and landscape change, the environmental impact of science and technology, the unprecedented expansion of human population and urban environments, the origins of pollution, the politics of nature conservation, and environmental injustice. The course will include lectures but will emphasize reading, writing, and class discussion.
HIST 305 - Race and Gender in Canadian History
This course examines the lives and experiences of Canadian women and men marginalized because of their race, gender and/or sexuality. By looking at people on the margins, this course explores the intersections of gender, race, and space, and speaks to two key issues of today: equality and justice.
HIST 324 - United States, 1877-1924
The period from 1877 to 1924 witnessed the transformation of the United States from a rural debtor nation into an urban, industrial, financial, and military power. Accompanying this transformation was an unprecedented gap between the wealthy and poor and an increase in global migration. This course asks how people from all walks of life experienced, interpreted, and sought to control these changes. How did migration shape gendered and racialized identities? How did workers, the middle classes, and the wealthy define the relationship between individual liberty and the social good? How did their political actions and social movements change the meaning of democracy, the role of government, and boundaries of citizenship?
HIST 332 - United States, Cuban and Mexican Relations
Since the mid-19th century, both Cuba and Mexico have experienced fraught economic, political, and cultural relations with the United States. Moving beyond a traditional narrative of US military and economic dominance of Latin America, this course examines the history of US-Latin American relations in two new ways. First, despite the recurrent history of hostility that has punctuated US relations with these two countries, populations in both Cuba and Mexico have also celebrated the domestic development of American popular culture while Americans in different eras have embraced both Cuban and Mexican culture. Secondly, social and political influences have never operated only in one direction, so this course addresses how Cuba and Mexico have in turn shaped the course of US history in demographic political, and economic terms. The course will treat such issues as US foreign policy and economic imperialism, but will focus on the social and cultural history of transnational populations and transcultural practices both within the US and in Cuba and Mexico.
HIST 344 - Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia
This course is an introduction to the history of the two Yugoslav states that existed during the twentieth century (1918-1941 and 1945-1992), both of which came to an end in wars characterized by large-scale violence. The attempt to create viable states in this culturally diverse part of Europe resulted in the experimentation with nearly every type of political system and ideology: from constitutional monarchy to dictatorship, from fascism to communism. A basic objective of this course is for students to acquire a critical understanding of the long- and short-term historical factors that made possible both long periods of inter-communal peace and short periods of extreme discord in this part of the world. Students will explore the region’s history through class lectures and the reading of a modest amount of scholarly literature. The bulk of critical reading, however, will be primary sources. These will include a short travel account, a major work of literature and a short story, a piece of contemporary historical journalism, and a documentary film. As the course unfolds, we will focus on a vexing question: What led many residents of the south Slavic lands, who shared so much in common, and who found ways to live together in peace for sizable periods of time, to choose in certain moments of dramatic historical change to engage in mass violence against each other?
HIST 346 - Sexuality in History
This course looks at the topic of human sexuality taking a broad view, both in time (from the Ancient world to the 20th century) and space (featuring Asia and Africa as well as the Western world). Rather than surveying the impossibly large canvas of sex throughout world history, this course looks at a number of particular topics (e.g. marital sexuality, same‑sex relationships, sexual violence) in different cultures.
HIST 353 - Colonial America and the Atlantic World
This course explores the economic, political, and cultural history of the Atlantic world as a context for understanding developments in 17th‑ and 18th‑century North America, including Native‑European relations, migrations, religious controversies, slavery, revolts and independence movements.
HIST 363 - Africa in the 20th Century
This course provides an in-depth look at developments in twentieth century African history. Beginning with the advent and acceleration of colonial conquests, at the turn of the century, the course goes on to trace the processes of social, cultural, political and economic change that have shaped Africans' experience of colonial domination and postcolonial statehood alike. In addition to examining the major phenomena of twentieth century African history — including the apparatuses of colonial rule, resistance and nationalism, development and postcolonial state formation, the impact of "structural adjustment" policies, and recent crises of genocide and HIV-AIDS — the course will emphasize how varied groups of African women and men, peasants and workers, rulers and ruled, live through these changes. Emphasis will also be placed on popular cultural expression — including literature, music, dress, and religion — through which people on the continent have experienced, understood, remembered and negotiated broad historical shifts. This emphasis on the ways in which historical change has been interpreted in African cultural production is reflected in the readings, which include novels, popular "pulp fiction" from the 1950s and colonial-era documents, alongside contemporary scholarship. In addition, the course will feature occasional in-class films.
HIST 3750 - Global History of the Indian Ocean World
This course introduces students to the connected histories of the transregional arena labelled the Indian Ocean World. It pays particular attention to how the global as a modern geopolitical and economic conception of the world grew from deep roots in Afro-Asian coastlines and the oceanic highway connecting them.
HIST 397 - History and Sound
This course examines sound as a historical subject and a medium for understanding the past. Emphasizing aural rather than visual sources, it addresses a variety of topics including the history of aural art forms such as music and radio; sound recording and transmission technologies; commercial uses of sound; architectural acoustics; and the evolution of soundscapes. The course may include training in the production of radio documentaries, urban sound walks, and audio podcasts.
HIST 398/A - Forced Migration and Displacement in the Middle East
TBA.
HIST 398/D - The Philippines and the World
The Philippines is not only a nation that emerges from worldshaping global relations, but is also a worldmaking historical force. As such, this course rethinks the time and place of Philippine history. We will explore numerous overlapping and interconnected themes, such as: colonialism and imperialism, religion and culture, capitalism and migration, racialization and indigeneity, gender and sexuality, ecological and climate crises, and geopolitics and social movements.
HIST 398/P - Dance as Social Life/Culture
TBA.
HIST 402 - The Philosophy and Practice of History
This seminar course is required of all honours students in History. It provides an introduction to the philosophy and practice of history, to writing and research skills, and to the general topic of historiography. The emphasis of the course this year is on the post-Enlightenment period. We will be examining the impact of the Enlightenment on historical thinking, and then moving on to an examination of historicism in Germany, positivism in France, American historical traditions, social history, Marxist historical approaches, the Annales school, feminism and gendered history, and the post-modern challenge.
Because this is a seminar course, attendance is compulsory and a significant proportion of the final grade will be assigned on the basis of contribution to class discussions. It is thus essential that you be prepared to discuss the readings every week.
HIST 437 - Advanced Seminar: Stalin: Life and Memory
TBA.
HIST 481 - Advanced Seminar: Montreal Performing Arts and Archives
TBA.
HIST 498/A - Advanced Seminar: Critical Border Studies
TBA.
HIST 498/B - Advanced Seminar: Student Protest in a National and Global Context
TBA.
HIST 498/C - Advanced Seminar: History of Science and Technologies
This seminar introduces students to recent scholarship in the history of science and technology. Since the emergence of the sociology of scientific knowledge, and with an increasing emphasis on material undertakings rather than abstract thinking as legitimate scientific practices, scholars have expanded the meanings of science and technology by problematizing the three implicit modifiers: “modern,” “Western,” and “innovative.” We will visit many unlikely sites of knowledge production, such as artisans’ workshops and early modern households, to explore how ordinary people gained knowledge of nature through experiments and observation beyond the modern science lab. We will also investigate how science and technology have been made and remade through circulation of objects and people across different parts of the world, questioning unidirectional assumptions about their flow from the West to the rest of the world. We will conclude the seminar with a discussion of “non-heroic” sciences and technologies that are by no means considered “new” or “innovative” and yet are crucial to the maintenance of our society.
Winter 2026
HIST 200/D - Chinatown: A Global History
This first-year seminar introduces students to the global history of Chinese diaspora. The class visits major Chinatowns in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, exploring their histories both as global phenomena and unique local products, all intertwined with foodways, tourism, and gentrification as well as the politics of race, gender, and class/labor. Students will read a variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from different disciplines and present their findings on various occasions both orally and in writing. The final destination will be Montreal’s own Chinatown, which students will approach not only as a subject but also as an evolving archive for historical research. A field trip, including a food scavenger hunt, is scheduled.
HIST 200/E - Gaming History
Many young people today are first introduced to history through games: waging wars and building empires in Europa Universalis, re-enacting the Cold War through Twilight Struggle, and parachuting into the French Revolution in Assassin’s Creed. Rather than dismissing this experience as a mere pastime, this course takes games seriously, thinking about the ways in which they embody and portray the past. The class examines games as historical sources—considering, for example, what a pack of cards might tell us about libertine culture in Ancien Régime France—but also as a means of exploring and interpreting history, contrasting the immersive and imaginative aspects of games with the discursive and rational approach of texts.
HIST 200/F - Oral Histories: Childhood and Youth
In 1960, the historian Philip Ariès suggested – in a work that both inspired and infuriated subsequent historians – that childhood was a modern invention that had emerged in Europe only around 1500 A.D. In unpacking shifting notions of childhood, this course is designed to examine both social constructions of childhood and children’s own voices in historical perspective. How has childhood – as a category of social thought – served to determine the social roles and responsibilities of the youngest members of society? How, and to which extent, have children shaped their own histories and given voice to their own thoughts and feelings?
The scope of our readings will be comparative and international, while course assignments will foreground the use of primary sources in reconstructing worlds of childhood, including paintings, obituaries, family photographs, material objects, and oral histories. Just how we can piece together, and make sense of, the faint traces that young people left in the historical record? To this end, you will have the opportunity to undertake your own original research project: an oral history of childhood and youth.
HIST 202 - Modern Europe
This course introduces students to the history of Europe from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, as well as providing some grounding in historical method and the development of a critical historical mind.
HIST 203 - History of Canada: Pre-Confederation
A survey of Canadian history, from settlement to Confederation, emphasizing readings and discussions on selected problems.
HIST 206 - Medieval Europe
A survey of the history of Europe during the Middle Ages, from the fifth century to the 15th century, with consideration of political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious developments.
HIST 235 - History of the Holocaust
Beginning with a discussion of Jewish communities in Europe and America before 1933, this course traces the evolution of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and racism, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement, the shaping of Nazi ideology, the growing demonization of the victims of the Holocaust and the genocide against them in their various countries, resistance by the victims, and the parts played by bystanders in the outcome of the Holocaust.
HIST 242 - History of the Middle East
This course surveys the history of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present. It traces broadly the formation of an Islamic World over a millennium and follows its engagements with modernity, examining closely the shift from the overarching paradigm of the multi-ethnic/multilinguistic Ottoman Empire to that of the mono ethnic/monolinguistic modern nation state. This course covers the political history of the region including the experience of British and French colonialism, the rise of nationalist movements, and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and focuses on its social, intellectual, and cultural history.
HIST 253 - History of the United States since the Civil War Era
This course is a survey of United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the present. It asks how contests for power among different regions, classes, and groups animated U.S. political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual development. Course topics include: Reconstruction, reconciliation, and segregation; western expansion and empire; industrialization and immigration; urbanization, suburbanization, and consumption; reform and radical movements, including progressivism, the labour movement, civil rights, feminism, and the new left and right; world wars, Cold War, and globalization.
HIST 285 - Introduction to Law and Society
Law influences all aspects of life in society, from resolving conflicts to structuring family or commercial relationships to controlling crime to allocating property. This interdisciplinary course examines the roles law plays in Canada and internationally, from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Cross listed with POLI/ANTH/SOCI 285.
HIST 298/A - Pacific Worlds
This course forefronts experiences and knowledges of Indigenous, Native, and Aboriginal peoples of Oceania in better understanding the entangled and intimate worlds of the Pacific. Although fundamentally marked by imperialisms, capitalist extraction, and militarization, the contemporary Pacific is also a historical place profoundly shaped by centuries of imaginative worldmaking by peoples across multiple continents, archipelagos, and islands. This course simultaneously embraces a people’s historical perspective on social dilemmas currently faced by those in the Pacific, such as: environmental and climate crisis, intensified frictions over regional security, struggles over displacement and diaspora, and ongoing desires for decolonization.
HIST 298/BB - Histories of Film and Performance
This course examines intersections of film and performance. Course material includes screenings, scripts, recordings, live events, and scores that help us reflect with the transmission of the shared past, evidence, and its exclusions.
HIST 306 - History and the Public
This course is an examination of the practice of history outside the academy and an introduction to the critical analysis of presentations of history in public and popular culture. Topics include archives, corporate and popular history, museums and historic sites, preservation, film and television, theme parks, and anniversary commemorations. A special emphasis is placed on public controversies and ethical dilemmas involving historical interpretations.
HIST 309 - Law and Society in Canadian History
In this course we will examine changes in Canadian society through the lens of important legal cases. What effect did these cases have on Canadian society? How did the press, interest groups, and society generally influence the course of litigation and the subsequent interpretation of the decisions? We will examine a number of cases from different time periods, touching various legal and social issues including discrimination, Indigenous peoples and the law, and the status of women. Readings will include the records of the cases themselves as well as contextual materials.
HIST 329 - Music in History
This course examines music as a medium for understanding the past. Depending on the historical focus, issues such as colonialism, nationalism, social movements, urban culture, youth culture, race, gender, and class through the prism of contemporaneous music genres may be considered. The course may also address the transformation of acoustic spaces and musical instruments, the rise of sound recording, radio broadcasting, online streaming, and the history of music copyright in relation to its composition, performance, recording, broadcasting, and streaming. Students have an option to create a podcast or curate a DJ set for a term project.
HIST 339 - Crime and Punishment in Canadian History
This course examines the history of crime and punishment in Canada. Topics include the definition and regulation of deviance; policing; trials and the criminal law; prisons and theories of punishment; the death penalty; crime and the media. Students engage with a variety of primary and secondary sources in readings and assignments.
HIST 356 - United States in the 19th Century: The Era of the Civil War
A study of American political, social, and economic life before and after the Civil War, from about 1850 to 1890. Topics include sectionalism and the breakdown of parties during the 1850s, the tasks of Reconstruction after the war, the New South, and the problems of a maturing industrial society.
HIST 360 - The History and Sociology of Genocide from 1945-Present
This course explores the history of a form of mass violence that many legal experts, human rights advocates, and scholars have understood as "genocide." After studying the history of the genesis of this term, we will examine primary sources that will give us a window into the worlds of ordinary people who have survived and perpetrated instances of mass killings. In the last third of the course we will explore why the international community has, more often than not, proven incapable of preventing and effectively halting gross violations of human rights. Cases to be examined will include Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and East Timor. This is a reading-intensive course, and our texts will include survivor memoirs, interviews with perpetrators, writings by human rights advocates, works of historical journalism, and scholarly studies.
HIST 3620 - African Slavery in Global Perspective
This course introduces students to the history of African slavery from a global perspective (broadly covering the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Indian Ocean littoral) from the 15th century to its legacies in the present. Throughout, the aim is to tell this history from the perspective of the enslaved and their descendants.
HIST 368 - African Popular Culture
From African-American choirs touring South Africa in the early 1900s to Nigerian pulp fiction and the contemporary popularity of hip-hop and Hindi film in Africa, this course explores the varied terrain of African popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning prior to European colonization of the continent, and moving through the hybrid cultural forms produced under imperial rule, to the politics of culture in postcolonial states, we will track the myriad ways in which African popular cultures have developed in relation to broader political and socio-economic shifts. In highlighting the heterogeneous character of this popular cultural field — one which extends beyond the continent through diaspora and migration — particular emphasis will be placed on how African cultural forms have been shaped in conversation with influences from far afield. Our 'texts' in this course will range broadly, including not only scholarly work, but also fiction, film, music and images that provide entry points into the ways African artists, youth, officials, freedom fighters, market women, bachelors, gangsters and others have engaged culturally with the world around them.
HIST 370 - Japanese Popular Culture
This course traces the history of Japanese popular culture from the 1600s to the present, with emphasis on the last 50 years. The major focus is on the evolution of Japanese popular media such as films, anime, and manga. Other themes such as youth culture, fashion, and the spread of Japanese popular culture outside of the country’s borders are explored. No background knowledge or Japanese language skills are required.
HIST 378 - History of the Soviet Union
This course examines the main economic, social, and political developments of the history of the Soviet Union from its creation in 1917 to its collapse in 1991. Particular attention is paid to the Stalin era, the impact of World War II, and the Cold War.
HIST 387 - Special topic: Public History as Protest
TBA.
HIST 398/E - American Capitalism
This course examines the history of capitalism and its relation to the making of the United States from the 15 th century to the present. We will trace the formation of “American capitalism” from its origins as a network of settler and extractive colonies in the Americas and its expansion as a continental and global empire. Different intertwining histories of enslavement, accumulation, dispossession, extraction, production, speculation, and consumption will be explored. We will pay particular attention to how and why “American capitalism” was produced and reproduced in and through material relation of power based on hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and religion. The readings will draw from multiple historiographies and fields, including the Black radical tradition, women of color and Third World feminisms, queer of color critique, and Indigenous decolonization.
HIST 398/G - Ugly Beautiful: History of Fashion
This course approaches fashion as an expression of political, social, and cultural identity. At the same time, it considers fashion as a material outcome of the exploitation of human labor and natural resources. Combining these two approaches, the course explores how ugly we can be to achieve what we deem beautiful without losing attention to the fluid boundaries between ugly and beautiful as a historical construct. We will read and discuss a variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from history, anthropology, fashion theory, and more.
HIST 398/H - History of the Climate Crisis
This course will allow students to delve into the complex environmental, social, political, and scientific history of our ongoing, global crisis of human-made climate change. We’ll begin by situating the crisis in the longer history of Earth’s climate from the Pleistocene to the Little Ice Age, but the emphasis of the course will be on how abiding material changes across the world resulting from human activities in modern times—since roughly 1500 (expansion of agrarian land uses, unbridled resource extraction, colonialism, global trade, uncontainable consumer and industrial waste, increasing reliance on fossil fuels, and much more)—have had disparate direct and indirect social, political, economic, and cultural consequences for different communities around the world.
HIST 403 - Methodology in History
This course will provide an introduction to historical methods—conducting research into and presentation of findings about historical subjects. Topics will include: critical and effective reading of historical sources; exploration of non-written sources as historical evidence; use of quantitative methods in history; concrete problems of interpretation encountered during historical research; and the presentation of findings through different forms of writing. Because this is required Honours course, it will have no particular geographical or chronological focus. In the course of the term, students will write and present to the other students an extended essay based on primary-source research.
HIST 412 - Advanced Topics: Quebec Society and Culture
This seminar will explore a series of themes in the social and cultural history of Quebec in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Students will develop and deepen their appreciation of the issues and perspectives that have stimulated research and debate among Quebec historians in recent years. Themes such as modernity, gender, religion, the environment, social class, ethnicity, law, family, and indigeneity will be among those considered. While not neglecting rural society or the regions, participants will have ample opportunity to focus on the diverse and dynamic experiences of Montrealers over the long period bounded by the rebellions of 1837-38 and the 1995 referendum.
HIST 485 - Advanced Topics: Oral History: Methodology, Theory and Ethics
Oral history is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that seeks to understand the lived interior of history. This advanced seminar will enable students to workshop their own oral history methodology through the various stages of a project. Students will go through ethics, conduct two interviews, transcribe and data-base the interviews, and interpret them. All the while, sharing their practice-based learning with the group.
HIST 498/D - Advanced Topics: Telling History and Storytelling
This seminar offers a forum to reflect deeply about the challenge of writing compelling stories while also presenting cutting-edge, question-driven historical research. There are no temporal, geographical, or subject boundaries in this course; students will read path-breaking works of history from sixteenth-century Europe to the transatlantic slave ship, from the environmental history of the Artic Sea to the Eastern European origins of the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. They will also read several major works of literature - spanning contexts such as slavery in the United States, premodern worlds in Latin America, and the late twentieth-century Middle East - whose authors base their stories on a deep immersion in history, and whose prose can inspire historians to push their own writing to new heights. The only yardstick for our reading material is that the writing we encounter be in some way breathtaking and boundary shattering with it comes to telling stories about the past. A handful of historians somehow learn to tell history by writing beautifully crafted and compelling stories. Yet history departments generally do not teach students that skill, or even challenge them during their studies to see it as worth taking on. This seminar is an experimental journey driven by a simple question: Can we make that objective a central part of our learning and training as historians?
HIST 498/E - Advanced Topics: Writing Creative Global History
For scholars and publics seeking to explore how non-Western worlds – African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American – have shaped our political present, the “new global history” has become a touchstone. Methodologically too, much of this work has led experimentation over how to best craft historical narratives combining an attunement to globe-spanning structural forces with a feel for granular detail and the narrowly-channeled, contingent paths through which historical change takes shape. This course is a tour of cutting-edge scholarship in global history, exploring phenomena such as capitalism, slavery, the Enlightenment, empire, modern law, anti-colonial movements, revolt, and revolution. It also focuses on creative approaches to the past and allows students to complete a piece of historical writing that can serve as the foundation for an academic or public-facing essay.
HIST 498/F - Advanced Topics: Oil, Empire, and Modern Life
As human and other life on the planet hangs in the balance, fossil fuel extraction and consumption continue apace. Indeed, fossil fuel consumption is still increasing, which it has done so by around eight-fold since 1950, roughly doubling since 1980. Though fossil fuels encompass coal, oil, and gas, we will ask specifically, why oil. In this seminar we examine the geopolitical history behind the rise of oil and its emergence as a natural resource that humans ostensibly cannot do without. Rather than focus on the physical properties that make its burning and its transformation indispensable to life, we will inquire into how oil and power are connected via social and political networks. We will do this by mostly tracing the connections through 20th-century Middle Eastern history, but we will take detours to consider the global scale of oil’s geopolitics and political-economy, as well as global cultures of oil and resistance in the present.
