This course focuses on three interrelated themes. First, it explores the social and political history of Reconstruction (1865 to 1877) when questions of power, citizenship, and democracy were fiercely contested. Second, it considers W.E.B. Du Bois’s magnum opus, Black Reconstruction, a book that not only rebutted dominant characterizations of this period but anticipated future generations of scholarship by placing African American agency at the centre of both Civil War and Reconstruction history, developed the idea of racial capitalism as an explanatory concept, and made a powerful argument about race and democracy in the USA. Third, the course looks at the politics of historical writing and knowledge in the past and today.

This fourth-year seminar is funded by the Canada Research Chair in Urban History and is taught by an advanced graduate student in American history. The course, with topics varying from year to year will focus on major themes in American social and cultural history, such as, women's history, labour history, and/or the history of slavery and emancipation.
United States and Latin America Area

A seminar that puts contemporary U.S. debates over immigration in historical context, tracing the roots of such longstanding controversies as those over immigration restriction, naturalization and citizenship, immigrant political activism, bilingual education and "English-only" movements, and assimilation and multiculturalism. Extensive reading and student presentations are required.
United States and Latin America Area

The most striking development in U.S. politics in the last half century has been the rebirth and rise to dominance of conservatism. This seminar examines the roots of today's conservative ascendancy, tracing the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism and the subsequent rise of the New Right.
United States and Latin America Area

This course introduces students to the methods and practice of the study of local history, in this case the history of Scarborough. This is a service learning course that will require a commitment to working and studying in the classroom and the community as we explore forms of public history.
Canadian Area

A seminar on Canadian settler colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries that draws comparisons from the United States and elsewhere in the British Empire. Students will discuss colonialism and the state, struggles over land and labour, the role of race, gender, and geography in ideologies and practices of colonial rule, residential schools, reconciliation and decolonization.

Canadian Area

Weekly discussions of assigned readings. The course covers a broad chronological sweep but also highlights certain themes, including race and gender relations, working women and family economies, sexuality, and women and the courts. We will also explore topics in gender history, including masculinity studies and gay history.
Same as WSTD46H3
Transnational Area

A seminar on Cold War Canada that focuses on the early post-war era and examines Canadian events, developments, experience within a comparative North American context. Weekly readings are organized around a particular theme or themes, including the national insecurity state; reds, spies, and civil liberties; suburbia; and sexuality.
Canadian Area

How have Canadians historically experienced, and written about, the world? In what ways have nationalism, imperialism, and ideas about gender and race given meaning to Canadian understandings of the world? Students will consider these questions by exploring the work of Canadian travel writers, missionaries, educators, diplomats, trade officials, and intellectuals.
Canadian Area

This seminar course examines how Africans have interacted with their natural environments across time and space in varying regions. Topics may include rainmakers and nature shrines; crops and food production; climate change; animal and plant diseases; colonial invasions and environmental crisis; demographic change and urbanization; wildlife and conservation; big dams and resource exploitation.

A seminar study of the history of the peoples of southern Africa, beginning with the hunter-gatherers but concentrating on farming and industrializing societies. Students will consider pre-colonial civilizations, colonialism and white settlement, violence, slavery, the frontier, and the mineral revolution. Extensive reading and student presentations are required.
Africa and Asia Area

A seminar study of southern African history from 1900 to the present. Students will consider industrialization in South Africa, segregation, apartheid, colonial rule, liberation movements, and the impact of the Cold War. Historiography and questions of race, class and gender will be important. Extensive reading and student presentations are required.
Same as AFSD51H3
Africa and Asia Area

A seminar study of East African peoples from late pre-colonial times to the 1990's, emphasizing their rapid although uneven adaptation to integration of the region into the wider world. Transitions associated with migrations, commercialization, religious change, colonial conquest, nationalism, economic development and conflict, will be investigated. Student presentations are required.
Same as AFSD52H3
Africa and Asia Area

This seminar course examines the First World War in its imperial and colonial context in Africa and Asia. Topics include forgotten fronts in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, colonial armies and civilians, imperial economies and resources, the collapse of empires and the remaking of the colonial world.

Same as AFSD53H3 and GASD53H3

Africa and Asia Area

This upper-level seminar will explore how water has shaped human experience. It will explore water landscapes, the representation of water in legal and political thought, slave narratives, and water management in urban development from the 16th century. Using case studies from South Asia and North America we will understand how affective, political and social relations to water bodies are made and remade over time.

Same as GASD54H3

This course explores the transnational connections and contexts that shaped ideas in modern Asia such as secularism, modernity, and pan Asianism. Through the intensive study of secondary sources and primary sources in translation, the course will introduce Asian thought during the long nineteenth-century in relation to the social, political, cultural, and technological changes. Using the methods of studying transnational history the course will explore inter-Asian connections in the world of ideas and their relation to the new connectivity afforded by steamships and the printing press. We will also explore how this method can help understand the history of modern Asia as a region of intellectual ferment rather than a passive recipient of European modernity.

Same as HISD55H3
Transnational Area

Coolie' labourers formed an imperial diaspora linking South Asia and China to the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, South-east Asia, and North America. The long-lasting results of this history are evident in the cultural and ethnic diversity of today's Caribbean nations and Commonwealth countries such as Great Britain and Canada.
Africa and Asia Area
Same as GASD56H3

This course will consider the long history of conflicts that have rippled across the Horn of Africa and Sudan. In particular, it will explore the ethnically and religiously motivated civil wars that have engulfed the region in recent decades. Particular attention will be given to Ethiopia and its historic provinces where warfare is experienced on a generational basis.

Africa and Asia Area

A study of major cultural trends, political practices, social customs, and economic developments in late imperial China (1400-1911) as well as their relevance to modern and contemporary China. Students will read the most recent literature and write a substantive research paper.
Same as GASD58H3

0.5 pre-1800 credit
Africa and Asia area

A seminar course on Chinese legal tradition and its role in shaping social, political, economic, and cultural developments, especially in late imperial and modern China. Topics include the foundations of legal culture, regulations on sexuality, women's property rights, crime fictions, private/state violence, laws of ethnicities, prison reforms and modernization.
Same as GASD59H3
0.5 pre-1800 credit

Africa and Asia Area

The development of travel and travel narratives before 1800, and their relationship to trade and colonization in the Mediterranean and beyond. Topics include: Marco Polo, pilgrimage and crusading, the history of geography and ethnography. Extensive reading, oral presentations, and a final paper based on research in primary documents are required.
0.50 pre-1800 credit
Transnational Area

Modern interpretations of the Crusades will be investigated in the broad context of Western expansion into the Middle East (1099-1204), Spain and southern Europe, and, North-Eastern Europe. Also considered will be the Christian Military Orders, the Mongols and political crusades within Europe itself.
0.50 pre-1800 credit
Medieval Area

An intensive study of the primary sources of the First through Fourth Crusades, including works by Eastern and Western Christian, Arab and Jewish authors. The crusading period will be considered in terms of Western Christian expansion into the Middle East, Spain and Northern Europe in the 11th through 13th centuries.
0.50 pre-1800 credit
Medieval Area

What is good and evil? Are they known by human reason or revelation? How is happiness achieved? How is the human self-cultivated? This course will explore the diverse approaches that Muslim thinkers took to answering these perennial questions. Beginning with early Islam (the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad), we will examine ethical thought in various intellectual traditions (e.g.: Islamic law, philosophy, mysticism, literature). Finally, we will analyze contemporary ethical dilemmas (e.g.; Muslim political, sexual, and environmental ethics).

Transnational area

This course explores the practices of documentation involved in investigating, explaining and containing the varieties of conflict that have shaped the history of the Middle East over the past two centuries. Wars, episodes of sectarian violence and political terrorism have all contributed centrally to the formation of states and subjects in the region. Drawing on key works by political historians, anthropologists of state violence and specialists in visual culture, the course examines such events and their many reverberations for Middle Eastern societies from 1798 to the present.

Course readings draw on a range of primary source materials produced by witnesses, partisans to conflict, political activists, memoirists and investigators. Classroom discussions will engage theoretical texts that have brought to bear conflicts in the Middle East on larger questions concerning humanitarian intervention, democratic publics and liberal internationalism.

This course is an introduction to mystical/ascetic beliefs and practices in late antiquity and early Islam. Often taken as an offshoot of or alternative to “orthodox” representations of Christianity and Islam, mysticism provides a unique look into the ways in which these religions were experienced by its adherents on a more popular, often non-scholarly, “unorthodox” basis throughout centuries. In this class we will examine mysticism in late antiquity and early Islam through the literature, arts, music, and dance that it inspired.

The first half of the term will be devoted to the historical study of mysticism, its origins, its most well-known early practitioners, and the phases of its institutionalization in early Christianity and early Islam; the second part will look into the beliefs and practices of mystics, the literature they produced, the popular expressions of religion they generated, and their effects in the modern world. This study of mysticism will also provide a window for contemporary students of religion to examine the devotional practices of unprivileged members of the late antiquity religious communities, women and slaves in particular.

Same as CLAD69H3.

This research seminar uses our immediate community of Scarborough to explore continuity and change within diasporic foodways. Students will develop and practise ethnographic and other qualitative research skills to better understand the many intersections of food, culture, and community. This course culminates with a major project based on original research.

This course examines the politics of historical commemoration. We explore how the representation of the past both informs and reflects political, social, and cultural contexts, and examine case studies involving controversial monuments; debates over coming to terms with historical legacies of genocide, slavery, and imperialism; and processes of truth, reconciliation, and cultural restitution. We also examine the role played by institutions (like museums and archives) and disciplines (archaeology, history, anthropology) in the construction of local, national, transnational, and colonial identities.

This course introduces students to creative ways of telling/conveying stories about historical moments, events, figures and the social context in which these have occurred.  The course will enable students to narrate the past in ways, from film to fiction, accessible to contemporary audiences.

This is the initial component of a two-part series dedicated to the exploration of theories, contemporary themes, and analytical methodologies associated with the study of health-related matters. Areas of focus encompass the social and biological determinants of health, globalization and international health issues, health technology and information systems, and fundamentals of epidemiology.