The first all-Russian (which was really the first all-imperial) census of 1897 categorized the population of the Russian Empire by gender, by social status, by profession, by religion, and in a way, by nationality. In this course, we will examine the ways that those categories developed over the preceding centuries. We will examine how social estates developed, and how alternate forms of social stratification did or did not develop to challenge those estates. We will look at the role religion played in categorizing Russian society, and the ways that the Russian state viewed religion synonymously with nationalism. And we will investigate the ways that ethnic and national differences became more recognized as important sources of social division, too, related to, and yet separate from these other forms.

The history of the Polish Jews and of Polish-Jewish relations are among the most interesting and controversial subjects in the history of Poland. The Jewish experience in Poland can contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust and of the non-Jewish minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The course will explore the history of Polish Jews from the Partitions of Poland to the present time, concentrating on the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries: the situation of Polish Jews in Galicia, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and Prussian-occupied Poland before 1914; during World War I; in the first years of reborn Poland; in the 1930s; during WW II; and in post-war Poland. The course will examine the state policies of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Poland towards Jews; the rise of Jewish political movements; the life of Jewish shtetls in Christian neighbourhoods; changes in the economic position and cultural development of Jewish communities in Poland, and the impact of communism on Jewish life. Materials for the course are in English. Sessions will focus on an analysis of primary sources, translated from Polish, German, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, as well as on secondary sources, representing diverse interpretations and points of views.

The collapse of the Soviet Union along national lines brought about a renewed interest in the non-Russian parts of the Imperial Russian state. This so-called "imperial turn" has altered the ways that we think about Tsarist Russian rule. In this course we address different approaches to the study of the Russian Empire as an Empire from its origins in the sixteenth century until the collapse of the Tsarist state — but not precisely of its empire — in 1917.

The course reviews the history of the Cold War in light of formerly-secret archival documents. Examples include the U.S. White House Tapes and Venona decrypts; massive declassification of records in the ex-Soviet bloc; and parallel developments in China, Cuba, and other Communist states. Archival discoveries have cast new light, not just on individual episodes (e.g., Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979) but on the origins, strategies, and driving forces of this 45-year conflict. The focus will be mainly on the superpowers and their alliance systems.

This seminar examines selected topics in the history of the Russian Empire from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Part historiographical survey, part topic-specific examination, the course introduces students to important issues in the history of imperial Russia, including serfdom and unfree labor, colonialism, autocracy and authoritarian rule, and religious and ethnic diversity.

A historiographical survey of the political, cultural, and social history of the Soviet Union during Stalin's years in power. Major emphasis of the course is on historiography, interpretation, and an introduction to sources. Key topics covered include collectivization, the Great Terror, the gulag, WWII, the Holocaust, and postwar Stalinism. This course serves as basic preparation for a minor field in Twentieth-Century Russian History.

The field of food studies has emerged in the past few decades as a rich source of interdisciplinary research that also speaks to a broad audience beyond the academy. This class will introduce students to a wide range of approaches to the field from history and allied disciplines. Readings will cover all chronological periods from prehistory to the present and geographical areas from around the world. Because many scholars also teach classes on food, even if they research in other fields, we will also discuss teaching methods. Writing assignments will include weekly reviews and a historiographical term paper. Students should consider this class an opportunity to practice the art of writing clear, compelling prose, even if they adopt different styles in other venues. A part of each seminar will be devoted to "workshopping" student essays and practicing editing skills.

This seminar introduces students to current research debates and methodologies in early modern British social, cultural, and legal history. Topics include orality, literacy and print culture, religion, magic, medicine, drink, sex, work, and public order.

This course will consider some of the major themes in Victorian social and cultural history with emphasis on the most recent secondary literature. Examples include a feminist analysis of the victims of Jack the Ripper, a revisionist treatment of servants after Downton Abbey, and Covid-informed examinations of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Emphasis will be on trends in the scholarship, models for writing, and links with other fields.

This course examines the extent to which the Irish can be understood as a colonized and racialized people, and the degree to which they participated in the colonization and racialization of Blacks and Indigenous peoples in the British and American empires. It encompasses debates about whether the Irish were victims of genocidal policies during the Famine, and their role in what one historian calls the "casual genocide" of imperial expansion. It also discusses the character and limitations of anti-colonialism in Irish nationalist discourse, and attitudes of racialized minorities and Indigenous peoples towards the Irish.

This course is a one-semester seminar designed to introduce students to major themes and problems in the political history of the modern United States. We will examine a range of topics under the heading of politics broadly defined, including the ways ordinary Americans of various backgrounds practiced politics; reform movements such as Populism and Progressivism; American nationalism; the emergence of the federal administrative state; the rise and fall of the New Deal political order; and the resurgence of conservatism since the 1960s. The seminar seeks to provide an introduction to American political historiography that would prove useful to, among others, students preparing for comprehensive examinations.

This seminar will provide an in-depth exploration of U.S. foreign policy during the so-called "Cold War Era." Cold War historiography has exploded in recent decades: In addition to diplomacy and strategy, a history of US policy in this era requires attention to the intellectual, psychological, legal, racial, and gendered foundations of policy. Weekly discussions will consider how scholars have brought new methods to the study of the Cold War, and how consideration of the Cold War has helped propel the field of history in new directions.

This seminar explores the use of gender as a category of analysis in the study of international relations. Topics include gendered imagery and language in foreign policymaking; gendered beliefs about war and peace; sexuality and the military; gender in the global economy and global governance; sexual violence and international human rights; gender and international security; and contributions of feminist theory to IR theory.

This seminar will survey some of the important topics and readings in U.S. history after 1877. Given the extensive scope of the historiography in the U.S. field, this particular section of this course will have a thematic focus on the "history of capitalism," with an emphasis on the 20th century. This relatively recent field brings together subfields such as the history of slavery, business history, critical management studies, labour history, economic history, and the history of consumption, advertising, marketing, and logistics. In this course, we will pay careful attention to how historians have brought analytic attention to structural inequalities based on race, gender, class, and sexuality to bear on their analysis of political economy. Readings will include works by authors such as Tanisha Ford, Cedric Robinson, Nan Enstad, Bethany Moreton, Louis Hyman, Kim Phillips-Fein, N.D.B. Connolly, Peter Hudson, Dan Bouk, Lizabeth Cohen, David K. Johnson, and others. The course is designed for students preparing for comprehensive fields or others seeking a basic background in 20th century U.S. history.

The course examines the relationship between gender and the experience of slavery and emancipating several Atlantic world societies from the 17th-19th centuries. Areas to be covered are the Caribbean, Brazil, the U.S. South, West and South Africa, and Western Europe.

In this course, we consider how religion and ethnicity interacted and defined communities from medieval to present day Inner Asia. The topics and interests of contemporary scholarship often reflect the concerns and statecraft of the Chinese and Russian empires that historically dominated (and continue to control or influence) the region. Imperial control over Inner Asia assigned various roles to religion and ethnicity: totalizing social and psychological forces, reactive and exclusionary groupings, primitive and pluralistic belief systems, or simply negative.

Using theoretical approaches drawn from literary, religious, and nationalism studies, we critically engage issues such as ethnic and religious identity, religious conversion, inter-ethnic and religious animosity, nationality policies, and the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and gender. We will discuss the Turkic and Mongolian regions of Russia and China as well as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Tibet; religions include Buddhism, Islam, shamanism, and secularism.

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce graduate students to the major problems, paradigms, and literature on global modernity as seen through the lens of Japan. The course will begin with reflections on area studies as it has addressed questions of modernity and modernization in Japan, while also attending to recent criticisms of this body of knowledge. Although specific topics will vary from year to year, they may include considerations of nationalism, democracy, labor, social management, science, education, biopolitics, empire, temporality, gender and sexuality, culture and ideology, warfare, social conflict, and shifting understandings of human difference. Readings selected for their theoretical or comparative utility will complement those on Japan.

This course introduces students to the historical debates on religion and society in the eleven states that now constitute "Southeast Asia." Readings will address how religious practices in the region — animism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity — have served as forces for social and political change in the modern period. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of "religion" in the region's political transitions in the twentieth century, including the ways in which Southeast Asia's approach toward "modernity" directly relies upon religious authority.

This course introduces students to a series of important topics in recent scholarship on late imperial and modern Chinese history. It covers major methodological and theoretical issues and debates such as the relationship between history and interdisciplinary theory, Orientalism and postcolonial studies, women and gender study, print culture, history of emotions, nationalism and modernity, economic history, microhistory, archives and knowledge production, and rethinking of Chinese legal "tradition." The assignments could include research paper, one or more critical/reflective book reviews from a reading list, and/or critical reflection essays on the class readings.

Over the last few years, the task of rethinking the British Empire has involved reconnecting issues of race, class, gender, nation, and empire. This new imperial history is greatly strengthened by recent historical works which explore a range of issues including mixed-race liaisons, lascar seamen, the English language, conversion, and chain migration. This history connects the local and the global. This course offers a thematic approach focused on modern South Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Rim, and the British Empire. Through exemplary studies, it challenges conventional, uni-directional dichotomies of empire-periphery and homeland-diaspora. It discusses how multi-directional modes of imperial circulation and diasporic flows transform both our understanding of the British Empire, and of imperial and trans-national history writing.

This course interrogates the utility of the conceptual categories "empire" and "nation" in analyzing the modern history of East Asia and beyond. Chronologically, we will cover the collapse of the Qing empire, the arrival of Western industrial powers, the rise of the Japanese empire, the emergence of nationalisms in East Asia, and the ascent of China in contemporary geopolitics. In the final section of the course, we will move beyond the anthropocentric approach and the identity paradigm to explore the meanings of "empire" and "nation" in the context of the material and planetary turns.

Historians have often downplayed violence as a central theme in the foundation and governance of colonial empires. In this seminar course we consider the violence of conquest and resistance, colonial genocides, anti-colonial rebellions, everyday violence and the law, the impact on indigenous peoples, policing, settler violence, and links between violence in the colonial and post-colonial eras. What are the implications for new thinking about some of the major issues in recent history such as the Holocaust and world wars, the crisis of postcolonial states, the Cold War, continuing western military interventions in Africa and the Middle East, and issues of memory and forgetting? We will examine case studies from a variety of periods and places in a comparative framework.

Made up of several independent nations and overseas dependencies, the Latin American and Caribbean region is both the product of a tumultuous past and a site of constant reinvention. Once the home of hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, this fascinating region has witnessed centuries of dramatic changes: from the Iberian invasions of its indigenous heartlands to the Haitian Revolution, from the struggles to build independent nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the rise of military dictatorships and more recent efforts to rebel against an overbearing United States.

This course examines diverse debates within the study of Latin American and Caribbean History, from the pre-Colombian era to the present (specific topics and approaches vary from year to year, based on instructor preference). No prior knowledge of the region or of historical research is required; indeed, the course is open to students from any discipline and specializing in other regions of the world. The goal of this seminar is to provide students with a foundation in the historiographies of colonization, racialization, nation-state formation, gender and sexuality, and the environment (among other topics).

This graduate seminar is intended as an introduction to key issues, debates, and themes in the historiography of women and gender in the global south. With an emphasis on Africa, we will mostly focus on recent publications that aim to make new theoretical and empirical interventions into what has been an experimental sub-field, especially in terms of methodology. We will also, however, consider older, now more canonical texts that still underline the terms of interesting debates.

The seminar will be a space for intellectual exploration and learning, for the forming and sharpening of ideas, and for discovery about some of the ways women and gender historians (and our colleagues from related disciplines such as historical anthropologists) have been making histories, working in a variety of fields and archives, defining and theorizing problems and using evidence-based research.

The requirements are designed to give students great flexibility in developing work that will be most useful to their various personal research interests and needs.

This seminar examines some of the key themes in African history from the sixteenth century to the present. Content in any given year depends on the instructor and also student interests. Students will engage with historiographical debates over topics such as legacies of the slave trade and slavery; the crisis of colonialism; experiences of mobility and migration; the trajectories of anti-colonial liberation movements; gender and women's struggles for autonomy; the impacts of environmental change; African responses to colonial "development"; the roots of postcolonial conflicts; and changing expressions of identity.

Other themes may include state formation and urbanization; labour, commercialization and "legitimate" trade; settler colonialism and segregation; sources and methods. Assignments will be geared towards professional development and include either a research paper based on primary sources or a historiographical paper.

The title description and course description for HIS1707H are being adjusted to better differentiate it from a new course being proposed concurrently, HIS1713H Methods and Sources in African History. The purpose of the proposed changes to HIS1707H is to ensure that students might clearly differentiate the course from Methods and Sources in African History.

This course examines the production, experience, and politics of space in modern Africa from a historical perspective. How is space — local, national, and imperial — produced? In what ways does power inscribe these spaces? This course will explore these questions through a variety of readings examining historical examples and cases from across the continent from the late 19th century through to the present.

This course explores the long process of the 'unfinished revolution' of abolition in the Atlantic World from the 18th to late 19th century Atlantic World. It will take a comparative and transnational approach, with materials that include primary printed sources, classic texts, current historiography, literature, explorations of the history of emancipation through digital and visual culture. We will examine scholarship and historical debates about abolition in the Caribbean, North and South America, West Europe, and Africa.

This course will provide students with a forum to examine the history of the region from prehistoric times to the present. Particular attention will be paid to the Axumite, Zagwe, and Solomonic dynasties, to the India Ocean and Red Sea trade routes, to relations with Egypt, the Sudan, Somalia, and the Arabian Peninsula, and to the adoption of Middle Eastern religions. U of T has a rich collection of unique online resources, including Mazgaba Se’elat (user ID and password: student), a database of 75,000 original images of Ethiopian art and culture; the entire collection of 219 manuscripts (18,000 folios) from the 15th-century monastery of Gunda Gunde, and a growing collection of interviews with craftsmen currently involved in chiseling out churches from the rock.

This course will introduce students to a wide variety of primary sources and innovative methodological approaches in African history. We will explore the connections between particular historical contexts and the constitution of particular sources, and how this informs different trends in historical production.

Each week will focus on a different type of source and the debates around their collection and use, including traditions of oral history, colonial and missionary archives, and new, less conventional, sources. We will also explore the political implications of historical methods and the struggles over knowledge, power, and the production of history.

This course will highlight the importance of context, contingency, and ethics in the creation of historical sources, in their use by guild historians, and in the politics of power embedded in any given history.

This course offers a critical examination of slave narratives in a range of historical contexts.

The slave narrative was used as a major weapon in the Black freedom and antislavery struggles of the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the Anglo-Atlantic world. The narrative was written by former or runaway slaves, or related by word-of-mouth to an amanuensis, and thus presented an "eye-witness" account of slavery.

The original purpose of the narrative was to inform the public (mainly Whites) about the brutalities of slavery, and its impact on Black life. Its overarching objective was to highlight Black humanity, and therefore Black people's deservedness for liberty. At first, the slave narrative was abolitionist discourse, then it evolved as auto/biography of the author, and eventually as history, political commentary, and literature. Not surprisingly, the slave narrative laid the foundation for the Black literary tradition in the western world.

Most of the slave narratives were written and published in the United States in the antebellum era, though numerous were also written and recorded in the postbellum period. As important, narratives were produced in the British Isles by African-born former enslaved persons such as Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) and Ottobah Cugoana. In fact, it was in Britain that the slave narrative first gained prominence during the latter half of the 18^th century as abolitionist discourse. There is also a Caribbean contribution to this Anglo-Atlantic tradition of the slave narrative.

At the same time, in this course we will read, explore, and critique narratives that fall outside the realm of the Anglo-American slave narrative, and assess how these narratives are similar to and different from the traditional narrative. Three such works are by Nicholas Said of West Africa (a Nigerian who experienced enslavement in the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and Russia), Mary Prince of Bermuda/Antigua/England, and Juan Francisco Manzano of Cuba.

We will critically examine the slave narrative in its historical, social, and political contexts. The course will be organized around such themes as gender and family dimensions, motherhood and fatherhood, sexual abuse, master-slave relations, flight and fugitivity, journeys and travels, gender bending, Black-White relations, literacy, and the search for an authorial voice by the narrators themselves.

Students will also be introduced to the sub-genre of the Canadian slave narrative.

Finally, we will explore the legacy and afterlife of the slave narrative.