I find teaching an intellectually invigorating and personally rewarding aspect of being an academic. History affords individuals a distinctive means of thinking about the past and its influence on the present. As a highly contextual sphere of knowledge, history can impart a deep comprehension about how the world changes rapidly and irrevocably, disrupting any convictions about the permanence of the present. It can also, on the other hand, insistently remind us of the variably delightful or disturbing fact that the world has not transcended or escaped certain trends of the past. The study of history and the art of historical interpretation help us see these important ways that the past is still with us.
In my view the successful teaching of history involves three essential elements. First, and least exciting, students must gain some broad knowledge of the specific historical contexts that they are studying. Second, and most significant in undergraduate education, they need to develop and practice the skill of engaging conceptually with historical arguments and interpretations. Students should learn how to think intelligently about the past and evaluate the ways other people have sought to make sense of it. Finally, and necessary at advanced levels, they should be given opportunities to understand and interpret history themselves.
At Northern Illinois University, I have offered a wide range of classes that include:
HIST 171: World History since 1500
Over the past half millennium, the world has changed profoundly. The currently dominant ideas, forms of social and economic organization, political institutions, and patterns of interacting with the natural environment would seem almost entirely foreign to most residents of the fifteenth century. To some, these changes mark the appearance of a globalized world in which people around the planet have become more connected and similar. To others, the abiding distinctions of place, class, and culture render this process less homogenizing than stratifying. This 100-level history course examines the past five centuries of world history from a big picture perspective. It pays particular attention to the impact of major developments on non-Western regions, as well as on Europe and the United States. The class also concentrates on one significant event to explore the forces and ideas shaping the modern world in more depth. The Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth century accompanied the uprisings in America and France, but in Haiti slaves of African ancestry declared and eventually secured their own freedom. This revolutionary episode directs our attention to a host of questions about world history: ones that concern everything from the conquest of the Americas and development of the transatlantic slave trade to the character of modern democracy and the exacerbation of global inequalities.
HIST 336: Medieval Russia
This course focuses on the history of three polities that emerged in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages: Kievan Rus´, the Golden Horde, and Muscovy. From the tenth through the seventeenth-century, these entities exerted power over part of a terrain that would become Russia. This period witnessed the conversion to Orthodox Christianity, subjugation to the Mongol Empire, the growth of small principalities and the rise of one over the others (Moscow), Ivan IV’s campaign against nobles and foreigners, the Time of Troubles, the beginning of the Romanov dynasty, and a schism within the church. As the course explores this history, it examines issues such as imperial expansion, religion, social uprisings, ideologies of rule, environmental influences and change, artistic currents, rulers and everyday subjects, gender differences, class distinctions, and divergent ethnic experiences. It also pays particular attention to the role of spatial imaginings in transforming Muscovy into an empire.
HIST 337: Russian Empire
From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, Russia became one of the largest and most ethnically-diverse empires on the planet. This course examines the history of Russia from a small principality surrounding the city of Moscow to a massive autocratic state that splintered apart during World War I. In these centuries, the country experienced Ivan IV’s campaign against nobles and foreigners, the Time of Troubles, the rise of the Romanov dynasty, the reforms of Tsar Peter I and Tsarina Catherine II, the near devastation wrought by Napoleon’s armies, the abolition of serfdom, and revolutionary challenges to the autocracy. As the course explores this history, it focuses on issues such as imperial expansion, religious identities and schisms, reform efforts and social uprisings, ideologies of rule and revolution, environmental influences and change, artistic currents and intellectual movements, rulers and everyday subjects, gender differences and class distinctions, and the divergent experiences of Russians and non-Russians. It also pays particular attention to provincial life in order to gain a richer understanding of social history that moves beyond generalizations.
HIST 338: Soviet Union and Beyond
This class explores Russia’s dramatic experience with communism in the twentieth century. During the strife of the First World War, a radical socialist party came to power that attempted to transform a predominately rural and politically conservative empire into a workers’ state. Its first decade of revolutionary experimentation gave way to a massive project to industrialize the economy and modernize society from above. This Stalinist system produced numerous human tragedies, but also turned the Soviet Union into a global superpower after World War II. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union underwent great internal changes (abandoning the Gulag prison camps for instance), while externally asserting and imposing its political economy as an alternative to Western capitalism. A final reform effort in the 1980s known as perestroika resulted in the collapse of the entire country and its communist system in 1991. Celebrated in the West as a triumph of democracy and lamented in Russia by President Vladimir Putin as a “geopolitical tragedy,” the Soviet collapse continues to influence Russian and world history today.
HIST 389/ENVS 450: Global Climate History
This course explores the ways that climate and human beings have affected each other from the deep past to the present. Using the tools of environmental history, we begin millennia ago and look at how climatic patterns influenced human populations, their dispersal, and their occupational activities. We then consider the period of the Little Ice Age and how a colder climate interacted with economic and cultural developments in different parts of the world. We also analyze the complex political and social ramifications of climatic phenomena such as the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815, El Niño events in the late nineteenth century, and glacial melting in the twentieth century. We conclude with an examination of the history of modern meteorology and climate science, in particular how researchers came to understand the process of human-induced climate change.
HIST 395: Historical Methods
This course systematically introduces you to some of the main methodologies and approaches in the discipline of history. In doing so, it aims to prepare you for the more advanced levels of historical study required to complete a major in the history department at NIU. Unlike most classes, it does not focus primarily on a specific place, time, or theme. Instead, we engage with broader questions like what is history, how have scholars attempted to do it, and how does one conduct historical research. The class works on three separate, but mutually reinforcing, planes: 1) You become acquainted with the methodologies of history, including the larger missions of the discipline and the pragmatics of research and writing. 2) You participate in a discussion seminar on selected works of scholarship in order to gain a better appreciation of historiographical debate and argumentation. 3) You work toward a research paper on a topic of your choosing that is based on primary and secondary sources and advances an original interpretation. This assignment should serve as a mini-495 paper, preparing you well to complete the capstone requirement for the major in a later semester.
HIST 434: The Russian Revolution
After two and a half years of bloody and exhausting war, one of Europe’s largest empires dramatically fell. The collapse of the Russian monarchy in February 1917 quickly precipitated a series of events that led to the formation of the world’s first communist government. The Bolsheviks came to power in a maelstrom of war, social strife, protest, plots, intrigues, and a changing global political order. Their tumultuous experience in attempting to create a workers’ state helped define the terms of political debate worldwide in the twentieth-century. Participants, observers, and historians have understood the Russian Revolution in multiple and contradictory ways. Was it a workers’ revolution? A Bolshevik coup led by Vladimir Lenin? The evil doings of that maniacal monk Rasputin? The revenge of rural society for generations of oppression? A cultural re-enactment of the French Revolution? The collapse and rebirth of a decrepit empire? The emergence of a new modern state forged in war? All of these interpretations of the Russian Revolution depend on explicit or implicit analytical frameworks that assign significance to some evidence and patterns over others.
HIST 435: Stalinism
After a decade of Russia’s experiment with a new revolutionary order, a dictator consolidated his power and embarked on a more radical and violent project of “building socialism.” The reforms under Joseph Stalin quickly transformed the Soviet Union into an industrialized country in the 1930s. On his watch, the USSR also became a global superpower after its hard fought victory in World War II. The communist system that Stalin created served as the main ideological and geopolitical rival of American-style capitalism during the Cold War. This ascent of the Soviet Union occurred through extraordinarily inhumane means. The state uprooted the lives of rural peasants and former elites and limited the independence of a growing working class, in whose name it claimed to rule. The hasty establishment of a collectivized agricultural sector and rapid industrialization created hardships and food shortages for many. The Stalinist government also employed state violence against imagined internal enemies, staging show trials and sanctioning mass operations against target populations. Secret police agents executed large numbers of individuals, but many more victims of state oppression ended up in the notorious prison system known as the Gulag. The deadliest tragedy came with the war with Nazi Germany, when over twenty-five million Soviet citizens lost their lives. Historians’ attempts to understand this turbulent era have unsurprisingly yielded many contentious debates. Was Stalinism the inevitable outcome of Russia’s socialist revolution? What was the role of the dictator himself in creating this oppressive system? Did segments of society support the Stalin revolution? How did people experience Stalinism in their daily lives? How can the seeming incoherence of the Great Terror be explained? Did Stalinism produce a new form of civilization or even new types of individuals?
HIST 495: Senior Thesis
This course involves writing an original senior thesis on a topic of your choosing. It is required of all history majors at Northern Illinois University. The class provides an opportunity to build on all of the knowledge and skills that you have developed in your studies so far and ascend to the next level of engaging in the actual work of professional historians. In the process, you become a practitioner of history instead of just a student. Through consultation with the professor, other faculty in the department, and your fellow students, you design and carry out a research project that results in a twenty-five to thirty page article of nearly publishable quality. Your senior thesis must be based on deep research in primary sources as well as on a thorough understanding of the historiography (secondary sources) concerning the topic. It must make an original contribution to existing scholarly interpretations and do so in clear, polished, and mistake-free prose. Our seminar sessions and individual consultations help further train you in the art of historical research and writing, and support you through the process.
Graduate Readings Seminar: Climate History
This graduate seminar introduces students to the developing field of climate history. Informed by the current anthropogenic warming trend, environmental historians have turned to the distant and recent past to examine how humans have experienced, perceived, adapted to, attempted to modify, and inadvertently changed weather patterns and climatic phenomena. This course addresses the question of how climate affected people historically by surveying classic contributions and recent works. We interrogate methodological conundrums such as the problem of environmental determinism, how to use science in history, and the possibilities and perils of post-humanist histories. The course also explores the social dimensions of droughts, El Niños, volcanic eruptions, glacial retreat and advancement, and other climatic hazards. Finally, it examines the intellectual history of the meteorological sciences and the recent politics of energy and climate.
Graduate Readings Seminar: Natural Disasters
This graduate readings seminar focuses on the history of natural disasters throughout the world. A key concern of the class is to determine what social, political, economic, and cultural factors exposed people to specific natural hazards in different historical contexts. Indeed, an emphasis here is going to be on showing that “natural” disasters are never just natural. Such calamities are always part of the history of human interactions with natural environments. The course additionally considers the varied impact of disasters. When have they permanently altered history? When have disasters revealed the inner workings of societies, including the power dynamics within them? After setting out some of the seminar’s theoretical concerns, the class examines specific types of disasters in different places and times. Droughts, diseases, storms, earthquakes, floods, avalanches, volcanoes, famines, radiation exposure, climate change, and extinction events are going to be discussed. These readings address varied historiographical fields, including environmental history, the history of science, US and African American history, Atlantic history, transnational history, and others. Students also select a topic on disaster history that interests them and investigate it in a historiographical essay.
Graduate Research Seminar: Environmental History
Environmental history is a field dedicated to taking past human relationships with the rest of the natural world seriously. It emerged in tandem with the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s and has since become one of the most active and influential spheres of the discipline. While initial studies often focused on the history of conservation and nature protection or investigated bouts of environmental degradation and disasters, more recent environmental history has encompassed a kaleidoscope of topics and approaches that all nevertheless incorporate the non-human world into historical analysis. This research seminar will introduce students to the field of environmental history with some select common readings. Most of our work in class will involve collaborative support and motivation as each student works on an original article-length research paper. Students should select a topic that fits with their own academic and intellectual goals, while still relating to the theme of the seminar. The papers should also be conceived as something that might serve as the start of a master’s essay for MA students or a draft of a dissertation chapter for PhD students. Unlike the written work students might be assigned in reading seminars, these research papers are not simply historiographic reviews of the secondary literature on a topic. Instead, they must be new and original works of research that draw on relevant primary and secondary sources and advance a significant and well-substantiated historical argument.