History (HIS)

A study of the ideals, creeds, institutions, and behavior of the peoples of the United States . Meets the State requirement in U.S. History.

Offered Fall, Spring, Summer, All terms

Explores the early development of societies around the world and their increasing interactions to 1500. Reviews the rise of cities and empires, and major political, social, economic and cultural developments prior to the moden period.

Offered Fall, Spring

Explores the regional and global interactions and exchanges that have shaped the world since 1500. Treats the major demographic, socio-economic, cultureal and political patterns and changes that distinguish the modern period in world history.

Offered Fall, Spring

Introduces students to the theory and practice of history. Explores the major philosophies of history and reviews current trends in the field. Introduces students to disciplinary research, thinking and writing skills, including the use of library resources, the analysis and interpretation of primary and secondary sources, the forms of disciplinary composition, and documentation standards. 

Offered Fall, Spring

Concentrates upon factors that contribute to shaping of individual, family, community, and regional history. Emphasis upon personal histories and individual relationships to immediate environment. Includes ethnic settlements, historic sites, oral histories, generations.

Offered Fall, Spring

Offered Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 120 and HIS 121 are required. Topics in world history is taught in grades 6, 7 and 10 in California schools. Emphasizes growth of world history as a field, regional and global patterns of continuity and change, and cross-cultural exchange as a source of historical development.

Offered Fall

The survey of the history of the ancient world with emphasis on the earliest civilizations of the Near East, classical Greece , and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Offered Fall

Europe from the decline of Rome in the West to the fourteenth century. Political, economic, institutional, religious, and cultural changes. The fortunes of Empire and Papacy, early Islam, the Bynzantine Empire, and the renaissance of the twelfth century.

Offered Infrequent

The Italian Renaissance through the Thirty Years' War; the rise of national states, the Protestant revolt, the Counter-Reformation, the hegemony of Spain, and the attendant commercial revolution of the Atlantic World.

Offered Spring

Course examines the African American experience from African slave trade through emancipation. Themes include the Atlantic Slave Trade; slavery and slave resistance; the emergence of African American culture; free black communities; black abolitionism; and black participation in the military.

Offered Fall

The dissolution of traditional societies in Europe and the emergence of modern ideology, from the Enlightenment through the French and Industrial revolutions to the period of internal strife and power politics at the end of the 19th century.

Offered Fall

The formation of present-day Europe amid continued industrialization, war, social and political ferment from the opening of the century to the present.

Offered Spring

Prerequisites: HIS 120 and HIS 121 are recommended. This course surveys the history of Russia from the founding of Kievan Rus' to the end of he seventeenth century. Topics include migrations of the Eastern Slavs; state formation; Russia under the Golden Horde; the history of Tsardom of Muscovy.

Offered Fall

Prerequisite: HIS 121 is recommended. This course surveys the history of Russia from 1689 to the Russian Revolution. Topics include the impact of Peter the Great; imperial responses to revolution, nationalism, and industrialization; the birth of the Russian intelligentsia; and the origins of the Revolution.

Offered Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 121 is recommended. This course explores Russian history from 1917 to the present. Major topics include the origins of the Revolution; the rise of Bolshevism; the Russian Civil War; Stalinism; World War II; post-Stalin reforms; the dissolution of the USSR; and major Post-Soviet developments.

Offered All terms, Fall

The discovery, founding and expansion of colonial settlements to 1740. The relation of European institutions and plans to American ideas, experience, and reality.

Offered Fall

Evolution of the revolutionary movement in the North American colonies. Anglo-American imperial problems, culminating in the Confederation period and the drafting of the American Constitution, 1740 to 1789.

Offered Spring

A study of the national experience from the Constitution through the era of sectional conflict. Includes expansion of the Union westward, the emergence of a national character, and sectional rivalries leading to conflict at mid-century.

Offered Spring

Social, political, and economic origins of sectionalism and breakup of the Union; military campaigns and the home front in wartime; reconstruction in the South. Focus on the years 1849-1877 and their legacy to later generations.

Offered Fall

The triumph of the industrial revolution in the post-Civil War period and the response of agrarian and progressive protest. The rise of the United States to world power and involvement in international affairs prior to World War I.

Offered Fall

Major developments in American life and institutions from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. Consideration of the social, economic, and political implications of prosperity, depression, and two world wars.

Offered Fall

Major developments in American life and institutions since World War II. Consideration of domestic politics from Truman to Reagan, effects of mass technology, the civil rights struggle, and confrontations with the communist world.

Offered Spring

Evaluates successive American wests from the pre-Columbian era to the present. Major themes include the Turner thesis, socio-economic, cultural, and political consequences of American colonization, and ways in which women, African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians shaped the American West.

Offered Infrequent

The social, political, and cultural history of California, from the period of Spanish exploration to the present; emphasis on adjustments of differing ethnic groups.

Offered Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 101 OR Equivalent. Survey of Native American history from the pre-contact period to the present.Examines Native histories and cultures, inter-tribal relations, European colonial and U.S. federal Indian policies, identity policies, tribal sovereignty, and modern self-determination movements.

Offered All terms, Fall

Traces principle economic, political and social trends in Latin America, post-independence. Considers the wide variety of local, regional, and national responses to questions about modernity, development, and social justice. Special attention paid to issues of class, race and gender.

Offered Infrequent

Course explores African American history from Emancipation to the present. Themes include Reconstruction; the Great Migration; the Harlem Renaissance; the Great Depression; the New Deal; World War II; the Civil Rights Movement; the Black Power Movement; and contemporary racial politics.

Offered Infrequent, All terms

Mexican American life to 1900, stressing the evolution of economic and political thought, social institutions, and cultural expressions.

Offered Infrequent

The Mexican American's contributions to the building of the Southwest; the clash between Mexicans and North Americans; the emergence of the urban Mexican American.

Offered Infrequent

The role of labor in the political, economic, and social life of the U.S. , including growth of organized labor, rival ideologies, legal decisions, and contributions of various ethnic groups, from the colonial period to the present.

Offered Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 101 or equivalent is required. Topics in United States foreign relations history. Courses emphasize interaction of strategic, political, economic and cultural factors in policy making and implementation, as well as, impact of major international events on American and global society, economy, and government.

Offered Fall

Prerequisite: HIS 121 is required. Introduction to history, definitions, tactics, uses, philosophical and socio-political origins of terrorism and terrorist organizations, and to political systems such as fascism and Marxism which have adopted elements of terrorism as a means of controlling populations and the political process.

Offered Infrequent

Historical trends, movements, and patterns of global immigration to the United States . Topics of study include: motives for immigration; anti-immigration sentiments and activities; legal and political responses; role of distinctive cultural groups; assimilation and nonconformity.

Offered Spring

Prerequisite: ENG 110 or ENG 108/109 is required. Junior status is required. Covers the long history of civil rights in the United States from the antebellum to the present with special emphasis on the non-violent movements of the Cold War era.

Offered Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 101 is required. Explores the environmental history of the continental United States from the pre-contact period (prior to 1500) to the present. Examines how humans have altered the American environment and how environmental factors have shaped the course of American history.

Offered Fall

African historiography and history to the 1880's, covering themes such as human origins, environment, trade, cultural exchanges and migrations in the Indian Ocian, Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, and Arab/Asia/European conquest and settlement in shaping diverse societies.

Offered Infrequent

African hisotry from the 1180's to the present, including topics on European conquest, the invention of tribalism, and the creation of new settler states, nationalist movements leading to independence, and the challenges faced by post-colonial states.

Offered Infrequent

The origins and evolution of Chinese civilization and the influence of China on East Asia prior to the 19th century Western impact.

Offered Infrequent

China from 1840 to the present. Western impact on traditional China and the Chinese response. Analysis of attempts to modernize China . A history of the Chinese communist movement since 1921. Society, politics and culture of the People's Republic of China focusing on the era of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).

Offered Infrequent

Origins and evolution of Japanese social, cultural, intellectual, and political traditions until the 19th Century Western impact. Foundation for comparison and contrast of Japan before and after the Meiji Restoration.

Offered Infrequent

Japan from the late Tokugawa period to the present. Western impact on traditional Japan and the Japanese response; the development of a modern state, economy, and society.

Offered Infrequent

Latin America from conquest to independence movements of the early nineteenth century. A general overview of colonial society, culture, economics, and politics. Special attention paid to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity, and questions of history and memory.

Offered Fall

Offered Spring

Explores pre-Columbian Mexican civilizations, especially the Mexica; examines Spanish conquests and the influence of race, class, and gender on the development of colonial Mexican society; contrasts northern, central and southern regions; investigates Mexican independence.

Offered Fall

Traces colonial legacies, including those of race, class and gender in post-independence Mexico; analyzes the Mexican liberal tradition, nationalism, the Mexican Revolution and late 20th Century neo-liberalism; examines US-Mexican relations; investigates socio-cultural, economic and political issues.

Offered Spring

The origins and development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through 1000 C.E. Examines key historical theories and controversies, and the mutual cultural, political, economic impacts of these religions and their societies. Explores key beliefs and practices of each faith.

Offered Spring

The rise of the city from earliest times to the present tracing the establishment and growth of cities as institutions and the development of the process of urbanization; comparison of selected cities.

Offered Infrequent

Course examines how cultural producers have used various popular mediums including art, music, theater, literature, oral traditions, and televisions to articulate identities and to challenge hegemonic discourses of class, race, ethnicity, and gender as well as the structural inequalities they support. Repeatable for credit.

Offered Spring

The historical analysis of films as manuscripts and source materials for social and intellectual thought in the twentieth century. Emphasis to vary from semester to semester, for example: Film as History: The Great Depression; or Film as History: Latin America.

Offered Fall

Family relationships, sexual attitudes, patterns of growing up and growing old in various societies, and minority groups, as they have evolved with social and economic changes in various historical contexts.

Offered Spring

Changing role of women in the family, political economy and culture of various societies. Topics vary, for example, Women in History: Sex Roles in North and South America; Women in History: Women in China ; Women in History: Sex roles and Feminism in the United States.

Offered Fall

Intensive study of a single period, area, figure, movement, or idea in history. Topic may be either departmental or interdisciplinary, but focus is historical, and may be single instructor or team taught. Example: Special Topics: Revolution.

Offered Infrequent

Prerequisites: C or better in HIS 300 is required. Provides advanced disciplinary training designed to prepare students to undertake independent historical research. Offers advanced instruction in historical research and writing through exercises in historiographic analysis based on intensive collective studies of important events or themes in history. A grade of C or better in this course fulfills the GWAR requirement for all History majors and minors.

Offered All terms, Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 400 with grade of C or better. Collective examination of a topic in depth. Students will undertake a major research project utilizing historical skills. Three hours of seminar per week.

Offered Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: HIS 300, HIS 400. Independent study of a particular problem under the direction of a faculty member of the History Department.

Offered Fall, Spring

Prerequisite: Consent of instructor. The student develops and completes an individual study under faculty supervision. Repeatable course.

Offered As needed

Offered Infrequent

Offered Infrequent

Prerequisites: Courses in art history and appreciation are recommended. An in-depth study of such subjects as a single artist, a period, or a movement or theme in art history. Student should have a sufficient background in art vocabulary and concepts to participate. Three hours of seminar per week.

Offered Infrequent

Offered Infrequent

Offered Infrequent