Graduate Courses

The MA curriculum reflects the diverse intellectual interests and research specialties of the History Department faculty, which has won numerous awards over the years for outstanding teaching. We regularly offer a mix of courses on traditional subjects and topics along with innovative thematic seminars in social, cultural, and women's history. HIS 5000 - Historiography, required of all MA students in their first semester, introduces students to the methodologies and theoretical frameworks that historians employ, and serves as the foundation for subsequent course work, independent research and/or thesis preparation. Our current MA course offerings are briefly described below.

Note: Course offerings are highly variable from semester to semester. Prospective students are encouraged to contact the Graduate Coordinator, Dr. Edmund Wehrle (efwehrle@eiu.edu) for the most current information regarding course availability and scheduling.

Graduate History Course Descriptions, Spring 2012

HIS 5160, "Atlantic World"
Dr. Charles Foy

This course introduces students to the variety of approaches and themes that comprise one of the newest and fastest-growing fields in our discipline. The Atlantic World provides a useful conceptual and methodological framework in which to analyze the development of European empires, the creation of American colonial societies, and the emergence of trans-imperial networks in the early modern period (roughly 1400-1800) and beyond. We will read a selection of major works that have defined the field, identify different perspectives and approaches, and trace the development of the historiography. We will also consider the challenges involved in comparative, cross-cultural historical research, and the limits of an Atlantic approach.


HIS 5320, "US International Relations"
Dr. Edmund Wehrle
 

America’s interactions with the world long have been sources of both fascination and controversy for Americans and American historians. This course will introduce students to the historiography of American foreign relations. Students will read and discuss major works by historians concerned with a wide variety of issues that link the United States to the world and that take a number of different mythological approaches to that history. In particular, this course aims to illuminate the current debates between revisionists, neo-revisionists, and a new generation of diplomatic historians eager to expand the confines of traditional diplomatic history. Students will write several papers, culminating in a longer research paper, ideally based on documents in a volume of the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United State series.

 

HIS 5340, "Nineteenth-Century American Social and Cultural History"
Dr. Nora Pat Small

Participants in HIS 5340 will examine and analyze the history and historiography of various forces at work in the nineteenth-century United States. The course will proceed topically and will explore issues such as republicanism, industrialization, urbanization, labor, boundaries, and consumerism through the lens of social and cultural history.


HIS 5390, "US Civil War"
Dr. Mark Hubbard


In this research and readings seminar we will analyze America’s defining crisis, from its origins through Reconstruction.   We will consider the political, military, social, economic, and cultural dimensions of the period, with emphasis on the connections among politics, ideology and culture in both the North and South. Students will gain a valuable introduction to the important historical literatures of this crucial era in US history.  The major writing assignment will involve a research project based in part on primary sources on some aspect of the Civil War era, subject to my approval.


HIS 5430, "Modern Germany"
Dr. Sace Elder

Germany: a society responsible for some of the most important artistic, philosophical, and scientific achievements of the modern period, a society that would become in the later twentieth century one of the most prosperous and stable democracies in the world. How could it have also produced the genocidal Herero War, wartime atrocities in Belgium, paramilitary violence in the 1920s, the Holocaust, the Baader-Meinhof Gang? Toward an answer to these questions, this course takes as its focus the role of violence in German society. The course will explore such topics as militarism and paramilitarism, racial violence, domestic violence, and terrorism. Along the way we will be comparing the German case to that of other national contexts to determine the extent to which Germany followed a “special path” of development when it came to violence. 


HIS 5700, "Gender and Race in Modern Asia"
Dr. Jinhee Lee

Intensive study in special topics in World History to be determined by the instructor.