Lib W-4540

Tu Th 6:50-8:10

Popular perceptions and representations of Islam and Muslims are often founded on ignorance and outright prejudice.  Fundamental to these understandings are narrow and highly politicized notions of history, frequently accepted uncritically.  Accordingly, this course seeks first to introduce analytical approaches crucial to developing nuanced understandings of historical and contemporary depictions of Islam and Muslims.  In addition, the course provides a broad outline of the history of Islamic Civilizations from Iberia and North Africa to South and Southeast Asia, and from the Mediterranean to Sub-Saharan Africa, and a basic understanding of key religious and secular institutions that characterize Muslim societies.  While the course is broadly chronological, we will also examine key topics in detail, including the life of the Prophet, conversion and the global spread of Islam, colonialism and imperialism, radical militant and progressive Muslim politics, media representations, and Islam in the West.  The course is not comprehensive, but seeks to provide a basic understand of the history of Islam from Muhammad to the present, and a solid empirical and methodological foundation for further inquiry.  Requirements include regular attendance and participation, map quiz, take-home midterm and final exams, and a media analysis project.

SBS N-318

Tu Th 2:20-3:40

Taking oceans, rather than nations or empires, as key units for historical study focuses attention on the movement of people, ideas and commodities across space, and the political and cultural formations that emerge from these circulations. This course will accordingly consider several different stages of globalization from antiquity to the present along the Indian Ocean littoral. We will focus on South and Southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa, and West Asia (commonly known as the Middle East). A methodological section on oceanic history, and examples of concrete connections with other locations will take us, on occasion, beyond the limits of the Indian Ocean itself. The course will consider, both in minute detail and from a bird’s eye view, inter-regional connections spanning the Indian Ocean world forged by religious solidarities, far-flung trade networks, labor migration, imperial domination, and anti-colonial nationalism.

Course Objectives

This course has two objectives. First, as with any history course, it seeks to make you a better reader, writer, and therefore thinker. You will learn how to read arguments based on factual evidence, evaluate those arguments on the basis of that evidence, come to your own conclusions–to think critically and analytically–on important questions concerning that evidence, and express–that is, write–your evaluations persuasively. Second, this course attempts to make you an informed critic of American politics and diplomacy as it affects you today through an understanding of the past as prologue to the present.

Nature of the Course

The first portion of the course is dominated by the impact of the Cold War upon American politics and diplomacy. To an unprecedented degree the two were interlinked on a daily and popular basis. Special attention is given to the challenges of the 1960s to the American political and global orders, from the civil rights activists to Vietnamese communists. The collapse of that order from the Right during the Reagan years, the search for a new world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the challenge to that order posed most starkly by the events of 9/11 form the basis for the course’s later topics.

This course assumes a basic knowledge of American history since 1945. If you would like to bolster that knowledge, you should obtain a survey of American history, preferably American foreign relations, for this period. Some good titles would be Thomas Paterson, et al., American Foreign Relations (volume two), Walter LaFeber, The American Age (preferably volume two), or Robert Schulzinger, U.S. Diplomacy since 1900. These books are not required and therefore not available at campus bookstores. They can be obtained online or elsewhere. Another possibility is Robert McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction. This book will be available in the campus bookstore, but it is not required either.

Readings

W.R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall
Herbert Schandler, America in Vietnam
Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly
Peter Hahn, Crisis and Crossfire: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance

The History Department has recently established a combined, 5-year BA/MA program in history.  This program will allow highly qualified and motivated undergraduates to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 10 semesters.  The program will provide a challenging 5th year of study that will serve as a springboard for those considering applying for doctoral study in history at  other institutions while providing professional training for those persons considering employment in fields that value the analytical, research, and writing skills that students acquire in the master’s program.

Click here for more information!

The Social Studies Education web site has moved!  The new URL is http://history.sunysb.edu/sse/.

Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:

Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia

Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in San Diego, CA.   For those of you who couldn’t make it…

Spring 2010 Calendar

Stony Brook Faculty Workshop

Benedict Robinson (Thursday February 11, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of English)

“DISGUST, C. 1610, FARINGDON WARD WITHOUT.”

New Research in Historical Social Sciences

Pablo Piccato (Tuesday March 9, 12:50-2:10)

(Columbia University, History Department. Director of ILAS – Institute of Latin American Studies)

“MURDER AND POLITICS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY MEXICO”

New Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza (Wednesday April 14, 12:50-2:10)

(Stony Brook University Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology)

“HUMAN HISTORY AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOR – RICH NEW LESSONS FROM EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY”

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….

Overview

Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port Jefferson/Upton area

Nassau County: Farmingdale area, Hicksville area

Tuesday, December 15, 2009, the Science Times section of the New York Times has published my first Letter to the Editor ever. Some decline.

Monday, 14 December 2009, volume 21, issue 1, of the LIHJ went online with six articles, eight reviews, a video interview, the first images of its eMuseum and the “enhanced mission” of writing Long Island history into the larger framework of local, national, and global history.

The Editor in Chief, Charles Backfish, summarized the main content of volume 21, issue 1:

The articles in this first online issue of the Long Island History Journal underscore this enhanced mission. Our publisher and Editor at Large, Wolf Schäfer, sets the conceptual stage using a letter written by Albert Einstein (summering in what is now Cutchogue) to illustrate the intersection of global, national and local history. Joshua Ruff, Associate Editor, offers historical perspective on recent tensions on Long Island involving undocumented day laborers. Joseph Tiedemann’s article on Thomas Jones, a loyalist in the era of the American Revolution, examines the plight of a Long Island man of privilege confronted with the realities of a more democratic society. Frank Cavaioli traces the chartering of a prominent area educational institution in response to the area’s changing economic needs. Neil Buffett studies high school students organizing to call attention to environmental conservation, while Associate Editor Noel Gish profiles Lee Koppelman, whose important work as a planner in Nassau and Suffolk Counties spanned several decades and whose Center for Regional Policy Studies was the previous publisher of the LIHJ. This article serves as a companion piece to video excerpts from an interview with Koppelman, which inaugurates what will be an on-going feature of the LIHJ.