Cool History Courses in Winter 2022

History courses aim to sharpen students’ critical thinking abilities, teach the differences between types of sources and how to analyze their contexts and meaning, and practice argumentative writing. In winter 2022, students can choose from more than 30 course offerings in history. The following courses cover a variety of places around the world, and they all provide students with methods and skills to understand some of the key events in the 20th century.

Find more information on these classes and the many other topics on offer by checking out the upcoming course list and UW time schedule.

HSTAA 317: History of the Digital Age

Professor Margaret O'Mara

Understanding the present and future of our high-tech world requires understanding its past. This course examines the evolution of the American computer hardware and software industries from the Manhattan Project and mainframes of the 1940s to the social media and software giants of today. We’ll explore why American technology companies (in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and elsewhere) became such a successful and consequential force in business and society, unearth the human stories and political histories behind the technology, and historicize and contextualize today’s debates about digital technologies and platforms.

This is a class for students who build, study, or use digital technology—in short, everyone. No prerequisites are required.

GE requirements:

• (I&S) Individuals and Societies

HSTAFM 163 Modern Middle East

Professor Arbella Bet-Shlimon

When the Middle East appears in the news, diplomats, mediators, and journalists often cast its contentious politics as inevitable—an inherent characteristic of the region. Instead, Professor Arbella Bet-Shlimon wants to show students how economic and social history produced the Middle East’s politics today. HSTAFM 163 provides an introduction to the politics, society, and culture of the Middle East since the nineteenth century. Students will develop an understanding of imperial power and anti-imperialism, ethnicity and sectarianism, religious and secular sociopolitical movements, authoritarianism, and the transformations wrought by modernity and economic development.

Professor Bet-Shlimon won a UW Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017 and recently published a book on the history of the petroleum industry in Kirkuk, Iraq, and its relationship to the city’s diverse communities in the twentieth century, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019).

GE Requirements:

• Diversity (DIV)

• Individuals and Societies (I&S)

HSTEU 234 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

The study and teaching of the Holocaust as an academic topic has followed an unusual trajectory. The history of the Holocaust was marginal to the study of European and Modern History in the first 30 years after the event. Then, beginning in the late 1970s, a surge of interest and rise in Holocaust “consciousness” led to a vast expansion of scholarship and proliferation of university courses on the topic that has not yet subsided. 

This course will examine both the long historical background of the Holocaust (two thousand years of strained Christian-Jewish relations), the intermediate background events of the preceding century (the modernization of Europe in the form of industrialization and liberalization), and finally the immediate background of the German crisis and rise of Nazism. Students will trace the evolution of Nazi policy to the Final Solution, the mobilization of collaborators throughout Europe, the Jewish response to an unprecedented form of persecution, and various attempts of resistance and rescue until the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945.

GE Requirements:

• Diversity (DIV)
• Individuals and Societies (I&S)

HSTLAC 490/HSTLAC 280 Drug Wars in Latin America

Professor Ileana Rodriguez-Silva

Any mention of the Drug War or the Drug Trade immediately conjure images of unrestrained violence, corruption, and criminality in Latin America, reproducing enduring stereotypes about them as inherently chaotic and self-destructive. This course takes on a historical reading of the local, regional, and global politics and economic dynamics that render certain mood-altering substances as legal while others are subjected to serious state surveillance or are outright criminalized at different moments in time. Simultaneously, the class pays close attention to the racialized, classed, and gender logics that infuse meaning into these processes.

The course will explore the forces of production, market, transportation, investment, and consumption that have turned these substances into profitable commodities. Together, students will uncover how these so-called informal economies are in fact well-entrenched within longstanding, powerful institutions such as political parties, elected officials, militaries, police, corporations, and banking organizations, all with extensive transnational links.

GE Requirements:

• Individuals and Societies (I&S)

HSTAFM 288 Introduction to the Horn of Africa

Professor Joel Walker

This small lecture course explores the history, languages, and cultures of the Horn of Africa. Beginning with
prehistory and extending to the present, the course offers a broad introduction to the region comprising the modern countries of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti. Readings and assignments also explore the experience of diaspora communities from the Horn of Africa, including the Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somali communities in the Seattle area.

GE Requirements:

• Diversity (DIV)
• Individuals and Societies (I&S)

HSTAS 265 The Viet Nam Wars

This is an in-depth, lecture-driven, and reading-intensive analysis of recent Vietnamese history and the struggles for independence and national unification vis-a-vis French colonialism, Japanese occupation, American intervention, and deep internal divisions.  It covers the historical roots and the contemporary contexts of revolution and war, various objectives and motivations of its Vietnamese participants, and the enormous human costs suffered by the wars' victims.  It emphasizes profound changes brought about in Vietnamese culture and society and probes the wars' lasting political, economic, moral, and intellectual legacies in contemporary, post-socialist Viet Nam.