History Undergraduate Course Descriptions

Intro to Digital Humanities (DH) explores how digital methods transform the way we do humanities research. Build practical skills by experimenting with data visualizations, digital archiving and exhibit design, content management, text analysis, digital mapping, video gaming, web publishing, and audio/visual production! This course applies DH through the lens of cultural heritage. Also known as Cultural Heritage Informatics, this field examines how material culture, texts, media, architecture, memorials, and traditions are collected, preserved, and shared in digital contexts. Together, we will consider how digital access and storytelling shape the preservation and presentation of cultural memory.  

 
HIS 360: Modern Military History 
Dr. Andrew Wiest 
M/W 11:00am – 12:15pm 

This course takes an in-depth look at the development of modern warfare from the growth of national warfare under Napoleon to today’s war in the Ukraine. Paying close attention to both societal and tactical developments, the course endeavors to understand military history in the broadest sense. The fist portion of the course investigates the growth of total, industrialized war – focusing on Napoleon and the US Civil War. The course then moves on to a detailed investigation of total war at its height – in World War I and World War II. Next the course investigates the birth of modern limited war in the Cold War era, highlighted by Vietnam. Finally, the course investigates warfare since Vietnam with special focus on Afghanistan and Iraq. Students will read three books related to the broad scope of military history. The books include: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory and Andrew Wiest, The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam. Since the history of modern warfare is so vast students will choose a third book in consultation with the instructor. Students will produce a book report on each reading. The reports will form 33% of the final grade. Students will take one midterm and a final – each counting for 33% of the final grade. 

 
HIS 424: Global History of Mass Incarceration (World in the 20th Century) 
Dr. Katya Maslakowski 
T/Th 1:00pm – 2:15pm 

This course explores how coercion became central to modern power through the rise of prisons, labor camps, and detention regimes across the globe. From penal colonies and the Panopticon to Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag, colonial detention, and mass incarceration in the United States, we will examine how states have used confinement to discipline bodies, extract labor, and define who belongs within humanity itself. Rather than treating prisons and camps as separate histories, the course places them in the same modern story of state authority and social control. Students will work with memoir, theory, and historical case studies to understand how incarceration functions across liberal democracies, empires, and authoritarian systems. A final project asks students to design a prison system in order to uncover the political, economic, and moral structures that make mass confinement possible. 

 
HIS 473: U.S. Foreign Relations 
Dr. Heather Stur 
T/Th 1:00pm – 2:15pm 

How did the United States grow from a colony of the British Empire into the most powerful country in the world? To understand this, we need to look at the U.S. and the world. Americans have never been isolated -- foreign relations have taken place on frontiers, within borderlands, and across oceans. While ambassadors, generals, and presidents have conducted the formal aspects of U.S. foreign relations, regular citizens have participated in American diplomacy as deployed troops, singers and performers, peace activists, and civil and human rights leaders. In this course, we will explore the many ways in which U.S. foreign relations have been carried out and how issues at home and in the world have affected each other. The course covers a broad span of U.S. history from the founding to the 21st century.