Syllabi

This course will examine the history of history within a global context. It will also include an analysis and study of specific theoretical frameworks used in historical interpretations and how the practice of history has changed over time. We will focus on the origins and development of historical narratives, practices, methods and ideas, and question the use and consequences of history in a variety of contemporary contexts.

Students will be tasked with understand what is history and how this idea, while common to all societies, has been studied and transmitted differently. How have and how do historians undertake historical inquiry? Other questions that will we consider includes: What role does history play in daily life? Communities? Nations? What is the use of history? What is the relationship between history and theory? What distinguishes history from other disciplines? We will use contemporary media sites, blogs, and other resources frequently.

As students of history and members of the university community, we should question and reflect critically on the diverse uses of history in contemporary society. Students should also begin to think about your own epistemological position – how do we know what we know about the past? How important is what is not known?

This survey course covered the major political, social, cultural, and military themes in Canadian history from the time before contact to the present. This course combined traditional lectures with workshops to learn about a diversity of approaches to studying Canadian history. Students examined specific events, people and learn to identify, critically evaluate and interpret a diversity of primary sources.

Students were introduced to digital tools like Zotero to help them manage their research and digitally born material relevant to course material like primary sources from Canadiana.org, digital newspapers, House of Commons Debates, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography and online news sources.

Students also selected a novel related to Canadian history and evaluated the effectiveness of learning history from fiction.

This course will survey the history of girls and women in Canada from both a chronological and a thematic perspective. There will lectures along with interactive learning activities and discussions based on assigned readings. There will also be a focus on primary documents. Students will consider a specific identity, career or life cycle phase and explore change over time. Students will be encouraged to engage in social media tools for their projects and use technology to facilitate learning and enhance their research processes.

What happens when the study of the past is presented in the digital realm? How does research and writing in a time when millions of significant primary and secondary source texts, photographs, videos, audio sources, artifacts, maps and much more have been made available via academic and public realms? Students will be introduced to a range of works on evaluating, interpreting and creating history using digital tools. Beyond course readings we will also critically engage a range of digital tools and resources as students will also learn how to construct, post, maintain and implement new media in their course work. This course will explore the current and potential impact of the use of digital media on historical analysis, practice, research and presentation.

This course will be taught with a blended learning model, including some flipped classes where students will watch relevant tutorials and lectures related to key concepts and then trouble shoot and collaborate in-class and using Adobe Connect.

This upper-level lecture course examines the Nazi German attempt to create a “racially pure” society between 1933 and 1945. We will begin by looking at the long history of prejudice, anti-Semitism and racism in European society, before focusing on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. We will consider how society increasingly became polarized between those Germans who fit the racial, social and gendered mold of the perfect “Aryan” and those Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Afro-Germans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and physically and mentally disabled peoples who did not. We will then examine how the Nazi genocide unfolded across Europe, and consider the motivations of the perpetrators, the responses of victims, and the potential compliance of the bystanders. We will end the course with an examination of war crime trials, discuss the politics of Holocaust commemoration, and consider the shifting definition of genocide after 1945.

Throughout the course, students will make regular use of the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Course requirements consist of regular primary document responses, participation in class discussions, a midterm test, a final exam, and a research essay.

Beginning with the 1871 Unification of Germany, and ending with the Third Reich’s defeat in the Second World War, this upper-year lecture course uses myriad themes to make sense of the tumultuous 20th century, including: violence, cultural innovation, diplomacy, gender relations, everyday life under democracy and dictatorship, memory and commemoration, war and genocide, and the changing place of Germany within Europe. We will discuss the fractures and divisions within Imperial German society, the home and fighting fronts of the First World War, the short-lived, but influential, Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich, and the Nazi’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” in Occupied Europe.

The course will consist of lectures, class discussions, and films. Students will complete regular written assignments using primary documents from the on-line website German History in Documents and Images and the graphic novel Maus, a research essay, a midterm test, and a final exam.

This upper-year lecture course examines German History from the end of World War II to the present. Beginning with the Allied occupation of Germany in 1945, we will study the formation of two separate states: the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. Using the tools of social, cultural, political, and gender history, we will then consider everyday life under communism and democracy, relations between the two Germanies, and the role of these states in the Cold War. We will analyze the rise of left-wing terrorism, consider the role of the “68ers”, discuss the role of atonement for the crimes of the Holocaust, and compare the lives of workers in the two states. We will then trace the events leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and think about the many challenges Germans continue to face following (re-) unification.

We will read primary documents and view documentaries and popular films (such as The Lives of Others and Good-bye Lenin) to further consider the interconnections between popular culture, memory, and political systems. Students will complete regular written assignments using primary documents from the on-line website German History in Documents and Images, a research essay, a midterm test, and a final exam.

The period 1900 to 1945 saw the birth of modern Canada. So much happened in this brief period that either continues to shape our experience today or that mirrors, however blurrily, events of our time. And yet it was a period unique and distinct from our own. In this course we will explore the period 1900 to 1945 both to understand it on its own terms as much as possible and to think about its relevance to the present.
The course is a collaborative effort between professor and students. Although the three texts are assigned in advance, everything else is up to the students. They decide on the the teaching method (in this case lectures), the lecture topics, and the evaluation methods. This means the course changes year from year, but, remarkably, not very much. I’ve attached a combined outline: the two pages they receive on the first day and this year’s detailed outline post class discussion about content and evaluation.

This course is an introduction to the history of what would become Canada up to and including Confederation in 1867. It is about big things beyond individual control such as climate, culture, disease, economies, and war. It is about people, some named and some not, in families and communities and engaging in personal acts like work and recreation, love and sex, staying put and moving, politics and devotion. As people met each other and faced their circumstances they struggled. Sometimes these struggles were private and limited, such as finding food for the day. Sometimes the struggles were public such as achieving responsible government. These struggles could be wars and rebellions, but many were not. The struggles could occur in forests, along rivers, on plains or in the street; in marketplaces, churches, legislatures, work-places, and homes. In this course we will trace this story of individuals, circumstances and struggles to understand more of the history of what would become Canada.
Regardless of whether you take more courses in History, you will be required to read, research and write through the rest of your university career and in your life at work and at play. Thus, some part of the course will be devoted to working on research and writing skills.

Rebellion: In 1837, just months after Victoria was crowned queen of the United Kingdom, people in the Canadas took up arms against their governments. In the next sixty years this happened several more times: in Prince Edward Island, in the prairie west and in British Columbia.
Confederation: Between 1857 and 1873 all of the British North American colonies except Newfoundland and the Arctic Archipelago joined together into a single political state. Between the 1860s and 1900 the people in the new country began to think of themselves as Canadian.
Revolution: the Victorian era was a period of several revolutions in Canada: In the economy, an industrial revolution that radically changed the way goods were produced, people laboured and goods and information moved. In scientific thought the spread of Darwinian theories and other nineteenth century innovations and discoveries radically changed how understood their world. Religious practice and belief was revolutionised in the wake of both the industrial and scientific revolutions. Changes in transportation, communication, production and belief all in turn revolutionised culture: the way people experienced the world and understood it.
This semester we will look at several of these changes in Canada to better understand the changes brought about in the Victorian era. We will do this through lectures, discussions, and a game that will stretch over three weeks of class. You will have the opportunity to do a variety of different sorts of assignments, working on your own and in groups.
The course is not a survey.