History at Hampshire College

History
As Faulkner wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Students of history might focus on Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the United States, Africa, or any part of the world; they might investigate the ancient world, the twentieth century, the Renaissance, or any time in between. Regardless of geographic or chronological focus, students at Hampshire connect their findings about the past to the issues and conflicts of the present day.

History is taught not as a series of static events, but as a method of inquiry, encouraging students to develop critical analytic and writing skills and to consider how we create “history.” Faculty expect students to ask not only “What happened?” but also, “How do we know what happened and what don’t we know?” Students are encouraged to conduct primary research and to pose and answer their own questions.

Student Project Titles

 * International Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War
 * Nazis and Cowboys: A Comparison of Lebensraum and Manifest Destiny Ideologies
 * An Illustrated History of Berlin
 * When Good Met Evil: Stories of Liberation in WWII
 * German History Through German Literature
 * Fallen Troy: A Narrative of Industry and Society in a Rust Belt Town
 * Privileged places: how relics built and strengthened communities in southern medieval France
 * Relict, Consort, Wife: Women’s Gravestones from 1750 to 1815

Featured Faculty Profiles
Aaron Berman Professor of History

Susan Tracy Professor of American Studies and History

James Wald Associate Professor of History

Jutta Sperling Associate Professor of History

Lili M. Kim Henry R. Luce Assistant Professor of History and Global Migrations

Sample First-Year Course

 * Making Sense of the Past

Although many of us have learned history as a conglomeration of facts, dates, and key figures, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing an understanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past. In this course, we engage in studying what is intrinsic to historical thinking and how it might be taught. We do so by engaging in creating historical knowledge using local primary documents and artifacts and by reading cognitive psychology literature on the mental processes historians use. Students complete a local history project, reflect on the thinking involved and on the ways in which such a project could be used in schools.

Sample Courses at Hampshire

 * African Development
 * African Diasporic Ideals, Identity & Movements in the 20th Century
 * Bodies & Souls in History
 * Conflict Resolution & Historical Analysis
 * Encounters With the Past
 * The Era of European Supremacy
 * Ethnic Conflict: History & Memory in Post-Soviet Eurasia
 * Europe & the World (1500-1800): Travelogues, Colonization, Ethnography
 * Gold, Lead & Gunpowder: Knowledge & Power in the Renaissance
 * Islamic Civilization
 * The Italian Renaissance
 * The Making of Modern South Asia
 * Media in a Time of War: WWII & U.S. Popular Culture
 * Nuns, Saints &Mystics in Medieval & Early Modern Europe
 * Queering the Renaissance
 * Race, Empire & the Renaissance Stage
 * “The Sixties”: Intersections of Movement & Popular Culture
 * Southern History & Literature
 * U.S. Labor History

Through the Consortium

 * African Environmental History (AC)
 * The American People, 1500-1865 (MHC)
 * The American War in Vietnam (UMass)
 * Aspects of Middle Eastern History (SC)
 * Empire Building in Eurasia (SC)
 * Era of French Revolution (AC)
 * History of China (UMass)
 * Latin America–Colonial Period (UMass)
 * Japanese History to 1700 (AC)

Facilities and Resources
A number of programs that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history, politics, and culture are offered through the Five College consortium. Through cross-registration and shared faculty, the five colleges offer programs in East Asian Studies, Peace and World Security Studies, Crossroads in the Study of the Americas, African Studies, International Relations, Women’s Studies, Latin American Studies, and Asian/Pacific/American Studies.

The Global Migrations Program at Hampshire College seeks to rethink old cold war paradigms of knowledge and citizenship in light of the unprecedented movements of persons across national and cultural borders that characterize our globalizing world. The program seeks to develop new curricular initiatives that are responsive to these transnational, multicultural movements and the local conflicts over identity, belonging, and citizenship to which they give rise, asking, "What happens when we make migration/movement the focus of our teaching and learning rather than discrete nations/cultures, when we emphasize routes over roots?"

The Center for the Book examines the changing media of knowledge and its effect on scholarship by offering courses, seminars, lectures, and internships to study how the digital revolution is changing our concept of knowledge and history.

Information Quoted From: http://www.hampshire.edu/admissions/history.htm