History Undergraduate Course Descriptions

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Fall 2025

**This is not a complete list of course offerings. Please use the Course Catalog in SOAR for accurate advising.**

HIS 300 
Research Seminar 
M/W 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM 
Dr. Max Grivno 

This course is designed to teach you the basics of historical research and writing.  By this stage of your college career, you should know that history is more than mere memorization and storytelling.  Yes, facts matter.  And yes, historians should write in a manner that is engaging, lively, and able to reach the largest possible audience.  But history is an academic discipline based on inquiry, research, and vigorous debate.  Historians do more than simply recount the past; they ask questions and explain how and why events occurred.  Historians are also products of their times.  They understand the past in different ways because they are steeped in individual milieus and are guided by intellectual traditions that have been developing for centuries.  The work that historians do is often tedious.  Primary sources are often fragmentary and are scattered across numerous archives and libraries.  Like an artist assembling shards of broken glass into a mosaic, they arrange their sources together into something that resembles the past, fully aware that their colleagues will come along and offer a different, perhaps even better view of what happened. 

HIS 300 
Research Seminar 
T/TH 4:00 - 5:15 PM 
Dr. Deanne Stephens 
**GULF PARK CAMPUS** 

HIS 328
Ancient and Medieval Women 
T/TH 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM 
Dr. Courtney Luckhardt 

In this course, we will explore the ancient and medieval roots of our modern ideas about women, marriage, and gender roles. From the Roman period through the Middle Ages, and ending in the Renaissance, we examine the ancient and medieval practices of marriage and divorce, as well as the important role that childbearing, motherhood, and sexuality played in women’s lives. We will see relationships between women and men, including the personal, the professional, the political, and the spiritual. The dangers and challenges women of the past faced were the same as modern women in terms of domestic violence, sexual assault and rape, prostitution, abortion, and access to contraception, and we will explore as a class how they dealt with those issues. At the same time, the joys, friendships, and adventures of medieval women will also be key. From queens to peasants, from abbesses to brewsters, ancient and medieval women’s experiences and work were as diverse as our own, with cultural changes affecting women's daily lives and reality. 



HIS 333 
Europe in the 19th Century 
T/TH 2:30 – 3:45 PM 
Dr. Joseph Peterson 

Course Description: Napoleon, Jane Austen, and Beethoven… Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sherlock Holmes, and Jack the Ripper… Mary Shelley, Mary Cassatt, and Mary Baker Eddy… Frederic Chopin, Sigmund Freud, and Alice in Wonderland… steamships, railroads, and Women’s Suffrage… “Human Rights,” World Fairs, the Eiffel Tower, and the “scramble for Africa”… Impressionism, germ theory, dynamite, and the Boy Scouts… the first bicycles, the first department stores, the first machine guns… the first hipsters, the first human zoos and concentration camps, and the first science fiction… The first age of mass literacy, mass advertising, and mass politics… The first recorded use of the word “socialism,” of the word “antisemitism,” of “feminism,” “nationalism,” “dystopia,” “agnosticism,” and “homosexual.” Why are so many of the issues and questions raised by nineteenth-century Europeans still with us today? Why does an age so seemingly distant and innocent—so “Victorian”—still feel so modern? What makes us modern, for that matter?  

The “Long Nineteenth Century”—from the French Revolution (1789) to World War I (1914)—was an age of unprecedented upheaval and contrast. A time of explosive economic and population growth, while many still went hungry. The largest and most populous cities up to that point in world history, yet the majority of Europeans still living their entire lives as farmers. A time when universal peace and harmony seemed within reach, even as Europeans perpetrated genocidal violence in their colonies. A time of evolutionary theory, historical criticism of the Bible, and the “death of God,” alongside the largest missionary and pilgrimage movements in history. A time when kings were overthrown, and constitutional governments put in their place; but those governments were dominated by a new, bourgeois elite. A time of middle-class triumph, yet a time when those excluded by the that triumph—women, peasants, workers, the colonized—were already knocking at the door. A gilded age, before the horrors of the twentieth century, yet an age that sowed the seeds of those horrors. We cannot begin to understand our present without understanding its origins in the nineteenth century. 

 

HIS 349 
Modern British History 
T/TH 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
Dr. Katya Maslakowski 

Ever wonder why the British love tea? Why the British monarchy still exists? How Britain experienced the American revolution? How Britain went from being a global empire to a tiny island nation? What role the Irish, the Scottish, and the Welsh have in the creation of the British Empire? This class will guide you through the exciting and important history of the British Isles during the modern era (1750-2025). In this course we will use the tools of cultural history to explore how social relations in Britain were transformed through industrialization, imperialism, democratization, and warfare. 

HIS 350 
Public History 
M/W 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
TBA 



HIS 351
Themes in US Military History 
T/TH 5:30 – 6:45 PM 
Dr. Douglas Bristol 
**GULF PARK CAMPUS** 



HIS 352
Oral History 
M/W 2:30 – 3:45 PM 
Dr. Kevin Greene 

According to the Oral History Association, oral history “refers both to a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and to the production of that process. It begins with an audio or video recording of a first-person account made by an interviewer with an interviewee (also referred to as narrator), both of whom consciously intend to create a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past. A verbal document, the oral history, results from this process and is preserved and made available in different forms to other users, researchers, and the public.” 

This course, then, is about the applied practice of oral history. You will learn basic theoretical and methodological techniques and study oral history's unique characteristics and possible uses as a research tool. We will identify how to create and critically evaluate oral evidence to integrate it with other forms of historical evidence. Lectures, readings, and discussions will emphasize the theory of and practical issues influencing oral history as well as the legal and ethical issues involved in this methodology. We will examine various historical works based on oral sources to explore how they can be used in, for example, scholarly works, documentaries, podcasts, digital history sites, radio shows, exhibits, and other forms of public presentation. Each student will conduct fieldwork on an ongoing oral history project, including conceptualization, research, interviewing, transcribing, editing, evaluating the work's historical significance, and writing/designing a presentation of that work. 

HIS 370 
Mississippi History 
M/W 9:30 – 10:45 AM 
Dr. Max Grivno 

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once wrote. “It’s not even the past.”  Mississippians live in the shadow of the past, one that offers sources of immense pride and a strong identity, but one that has also left painful legacies.  This course explores the complexities of Mississippi History from the beginning of human migration to the Gulf South through the Civil Rights Movement.  

This course is divided the into three sections.  The first, “Dispossession,” begins with an examination of the earliest inhabitants of present-day Mississippi and traces the evolution of human societies during the Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippi periods.  It explores the rise and fall of the Mississippian civilizations and considers the impact of the De Soto expedition of 1539-42.  It then moves to a discussion of the Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw confederacies and their struggles to maintain their independence in the face of encroachment from the English, the French, the Spanish, and later the Americans.  The second section, “Enslavement,” begins with the American Revolution and the creation of Mississippi Territory, which began a chain of events that culminated with the expulsion of native nations and the dramatic expansion of cotton production during the “Flush Times” of the 1830s.  It also examines why Mississippi’s slaveholders took the desperate gamble of seceding from the United States and explores the effects of the Civil War and emancipation on Mississippi.  The final section, “The Long Struggle” traces the state’s history from Reconstruction through the present.  It is framed around questions of race and citizenship and considers how the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Freedom Struggle transformed Mississippi—altering its economy, destroying legal segregation, and changing the state’s politics, all while leaving persistent pockets of poverty, poor education, and public health problems. 

HIS 370 
Mississippi History 
T/TH 2:30 – 3:45 PM 
Dr. Douglas Bristol 
**GULF PARK CAMPUS** 



HIS 400
Senior Capstone 
T/TH 2:30 – 3:45 PM 
Dr. Andrew Haley 



HIS 415 
World War I 
M/W 2:30 – 3:45 PM 
Dr. Andrew Wiest 

This course will investigate the most important military/social event of the twentieth century, the Great War.  With roots that date back to the age of great empires and repercussions that the world still deals with today, World War I ripped the old world asunder and laid the foundations for something new – at once a brave new world and one darkly sinister.  On the battlefront the Great War transformed the way wars were fought – from battles that Napoleon or Robert E. Lee would recognize to battles that spanned a globe and destroyed a generation.  As the world burned, societies were forged into something new, from women receiving the vote, to the rise of Fascism, to the coming of modernism.  This course will balance the battlefield, the home front, and the humanity of war.  Poetry, fiction, and music will also help us envision this important past.   

Students will read: Alistair Horne; The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916; G.J. Meyer; The World Remade: America in World War I; Ernst Junger; The Storm of Steel; and Paul Fussell; The Great War and Modern Memory.    



HIS 422/522 
History of Medicine 
T/TH 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
Dr. Deanne Stephens 
**GULF PARK CAMPUS** 

HIS 463/563 
The Civil War 1848-1877 
M/W 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
Dr. Laura Mammina 

This course examines the origins, prosecution, aftermath, and memory of the United States Civil War. While the course will primarily consider why the war came, why the war was fought, and how it ended, it will place just as much emphasis on the home front and conflicts that occurred away from battlefields. We will consider major conflicts, battles, and events while always keeping in mind how the war affected the lives of ordinary people. Political, economic, military, social, cultural, and religious developments will all play a role in the story, and we will pay special attention to the role that race, class, and gender played before, during, and after the conflict. Finally, the course will investigate the contested meanings of the Civil War and how it was remembered by white Northerners, white Southerners, and African Americans.   

HIS 466 
US Since 1945 
T/R 1:00 – 2:15 PM 
Dr. Heather Stur 

From the creation of the atomic bomb to the 9/11 attacks, this class will explore Americans' experiences at home and in the world during one of the most transformative eras in U.S. and world history. We will use a variety of sources, including music, films, novels, and political documents to try and understand what it was like to live through the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the Sixties, the Reagan era, and more. Take this class — you won't regret it. 

HIS 478/578  
Topics in African-American History 
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 AM 
Dr. Rebecca Tuuri 



HIS 480 
Topics in African History 
T/TH 9:30 – 10:45 AM 
Dr. Bafumiki Mocheregwa