Undergraduate Syllabi

Research Methods

This course provides a foundational understanding of the concepts and methods for researching and writing in the social sciences.  Combining techniques from similar areas allows students to develop a greater ability to analyze problems and propose well-reasoned and researched solutions.  By the end of the course, students will be able to conduct research and analysis on topics related to the social sciences. 

The Civil War and Reconstruction

This course examines the causes, conduct, and immediate consequences of the Civil War. It explores America’s bloodiest and most divisive conflict using a variety of analytical lenses, including its social, cultural, political, economic, military, and environmental dimensions. Topics and perspectives include the racial, political, and economic conditions that differentiated the northern and southern halves of the United States during the nineteenth century; the role of race and slavery in the conflict; the root causes and events behind sectional conflict, secession, and the formation of the Confederate nation; the military strategy and tactics put in place by the Union and Confederacy; the conduct and character of Civil War combat; the nature and impact of Northern and Southern political and military leadership; and the federal governments conflicting and failed efforts to reconstruct Southern politics and society after the war.

Military Force and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1945

This course examines the idea that the practice of war and the making of peace have been intimately linked to the nature of American society. From Cold War competition with the Soviet Union to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “how, who, when, where, and why” America fights has been directly related to our national culture, our values, and other social, political, and economic characteristics. The course will use both theoretical approaches and historical case studies to explore how this linkage of war, peace, and society has played out over the past six decades of American history. Although its primary mediums are military and diplomatic history, students will be exposed to and engage in other basic elements of social science methodologies, including political science, sociology, and anthropology.

America in Vietnam - A Political and Military History, 1950-1975

This course examines the American war in Vietnam by exploring a substantial portion of the scholarship produced over the past four decades. Although it will examine the origins, events, and consequences of the conflict – including its political, military, diplomatic, and social dimensions – the course is specifically designed to explore the retrospective “meaning” and “lessons” of America’s lost war in Southeast Asia as contained within contentious debate among scholars, journalists, and participants. For some, the war in Vietnam was an immoral catastrophic failure: an unwinnable conflict that never should have been fought by the United States. For others, American intervention was a noble cause: a necessary war that could have been won had different political and strategic avenues been taken. These diverse interpretations, along with other significant arguments advanced by the orthodox and revisionist schools constitute the major focus of this class.

The Cold War

This course examines the causes, conduct, and legacies of the global Cold War. It explores the half-century of struggle between communism and the West, including its social, cultural, political, economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, and environmental dimensions. Topics and perspectives include the origins of the Cold War; Soviet and American foreign policy and military strategy; the atomic arms race, brinksmanship and detente; spheres of influence and strategic alliances; postcolonialism; modernization theory and practice; insurgency and counterinsurgency; proxy wars in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East; superpower interventions in the developing world; and the conflict’s impact on society and politics in the United States and abroad.

Violent Politics: Irregular War and Western Response from Mao to the Islamic State

Throughout history, politics has been a primary method for solving conflict. War has been another. Violent politics – a method that involves a mixture of political and military means and resides somewhere between war and peace – constitutes a third. Over the past century, this third way has been the most prevalent. Despite the massive conflagrations of the First and Second World Wars and other large-scale conventional conflicts, the prevailing form of armed conflict around the globe has been regional irregular wars involving revolution, guerrilla war, terrorism, insurgency and Western responses to these phenomenon. This course examines the most dominant manifestations of violent politics to occur over the past sixty years: communist revolutionary wars of national liberation during the Cold War, transnational jihad and global insurgency in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Western reactions to both.

Soldiers, War, and the Combat Experience in American history

This course explores what former Supreme Court justice and Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes once called the “incommunicable experience of war” – that is armed conflict as it was lived and remembered by the common soldier. It does so by examining five memoirs generated by veterans of American wars from the Revolution to Vietnam, and by contextualizing these works within the conflicts, societies, and larger historical currents that spawned them. The course will pay particular attention to the values, attitudes, and beliefs of American servicemen as they were called upon to serve the nation in a time of war. It will also examine the emotional and psychological impact of combat and the ways in which every day Americans interpreted and made sense of this unique and relatively rare experience as practitioners of war and specialists in armed violence.

An Environmental History of Warfare

This course examines the intersection of war and the natural environment. It explores the ways in which armed conflict and collective violence have shaped both the physical and the ideational world we inhabit. Warfare has not only had a sweeping impact on the physical landscape, including adverse ecological consequences and the creation of militarized spaces, it has profoundly altered the patterns and conditions of human settlement, and fashioned the world’s political, economic, religious, cultural, and ideological character by creating, destroying, or altering political geographies such as territories, borders, states, empires, and so on. The course also investigates how the environment has shaped warfare. The natural world is more than just a setting for collective violence; it is an active agent that generates and sustains armed conflict, and that exerts a powerful influence on strategy and military operations. This course will use historical case studies to historicize this critical linkage between war and the natural world.

American Military History

This course surveys American military history from European settlement to the 21st century. It not only examines key conflicts that brought the nation into war, it explores a number of key issues pertaining to war and peace in American history, including the development and implementation of national military policy, the characteristics and behavior of the armed forces, and the relationship between armed conflict and American society. Oriented toward what is called the “New Military History,” the course contextualizes the American military experience within larger historical frameworks – social cultural, political, economic, and technological.

War and the American Presidency

This course explores the historical experience of the President of the United States in times of war and global crisis. It examines the leadership and decision-making of past presidents, the relationship between the Executive Branch and the uniformed services, the role the White House has played in shaping national security policy and military strategy, and the influence past wars and military affairs have exerted on the Chief Executive. The course also examines the theory and practice of American civil-military relations and civilian control of the military, paying particular attention to the close interaction and working relationship between the commander-in-chief, his political advisors, and the generals that serve them. Overall, the course is designed to underscore the powerful impact past presidents have had on military affairs and vice versa.