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History 494/714 Colloquium in World History: Readings in International History
Professor Brad Simpson, fall 2007
Tu 6:00pm- 8:30pmOffice Hours: T, Th 2:30-4:00pm
Phone number: 410-455-2042
email: simpson@umbc.edu
Course Description and Objectives:
This seminar will examine U.S. foreign relations and international history during the twentieth century from a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches. Its purpose is to survey some of the most innovative recent scholarship in the field (and one classic), work informed by considerations of gender, race, ideology, culture, development, domestic politics, international relations theory, political economy and recently released archival material from the former Soviet Union , some of which goes well beyond existing conceptions of foreign relations history.
For half of the semester’s readings students will prepare a two - or three-page paper as a way of getting discussion going. In these short papers the emphasis should be first on explaining the main points of the reading, and secondarily on offering a critique of those points. "Critique" does not mean tearing a book apart, but assessing a book's value, its importance, its place in the literature, and after that, what more we might have expected from it. Final Paper : Students will prepare a substantial review essay (12-15pp. for undergrads, 18-20 for grads) on a thematic topic of your choice in the field of international history or U.S. foreign relations, subject to instructor approval. Essays will critically engage the evidence, methodology and theoretical approach of 4-6 books grouped around the same theme, utilizing where possible available primary sources.
Readings:
Patrick Finney, International History (Palgrave Reader)
Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
Michael Latham, et al, eds. Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (2003)
Bruce Cumings, Parallax Visions
Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam & America
Robert Latham. The Liberal Moment. Modernity, Security, and the Making of the Postwar International Order (1997)
Frederick Cooper and Anne Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997)
Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era
Jeremi Suri. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (2003)
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Time
Basic Resources for U.S. Foreign Relations and International History
UMBC Department of History
1000 HILLTOP CIRCLE
ADMINISTRATION BUILDING 7TH FLOOR
phone: 410 455-2312
FAX: 410 455-1045
http://www.umbc.edu/history/