400-level HIS courses are two-hour seminars that deal with very specialized subjects and are often closely connected to a professor's research. Most have specific course pre-requisites and require extensive reading, research, writing, and seminar discussion, and in most you will have the opportunity to do a major research paper. All 400-level HIS courses have enrolment restrictions during the FIRST ROUND (must have completed 14 or more full courses, be enrolled in a HIS Major, Specialist or Joint Specialist program and have the appropriate prerequisite). During the SECOND ROUND of enrolment, access to 400-level seminars is open to all 3rd and 4th year students with the appropriate prerequisite. IMPORTANT: Due to significant enrolment pressure on 4th year seminars, during the first round of enrolment, the Department of History reserves the right to REMOVE STUDENTS who enrol in more than the required number for program completion (Specialists - 2; Majors, Joint Specialists - 1) without consultation.

Students in 400-level seminars MUST ATTEND THE FIRST CLASS, or contact the professor to explain their absence. Failure to do so may result in the Department withdrawing the student from the seminar in order to "free up" space for other interested students. Additional 400-level seminars for the 2009-2010 Fall/Winter Session may be added at a later date. To fulfill History program requirements, students may also use 400- level courses offered by other Departments at the U of T that are designated as ‘History Substitutes’. Following is a list of these 4th year courses. For more information on History Substitutes click here.

The Department also offers a few joint undergraduate-graduate seminars. These are indicated in the course description. Undergraduate enrolment in joint seminars is restricted, and the expected level of performance is high.

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HIS 401H1-F History of the Cold War

This seminar focuses on one of the defining events of twentieth century international relations – the Cold War.  Existing from the end of the Second World War to 1990, the Cold War is sometimes seen as a power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.  In fact it was something much more: in pitting two different political, social, and economic systems together in a zero-sum competition with each other, the Cold War drew in much of the rest of the world, sometimes willingly and sometimes involuntarily.  Specific topics to be considered include: the origins of the Cold War; the nuclear arms race; alliance relations within both the Communist and non-communist blocs; the non-aligned movement; various third-world conflicts and the relationship between the Cold War and the developing nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; détente and Cold War’s end.

Required Textbook(s):  John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (2005)

Tentative Course Requirements:  Seminar leadership/participation (25%); Research Essay (35%); short written assignments (30%); oral presentation (10%)

PREREQUISITE:  HIS311Y1/344Y1/377Y1

Instructor:  N. Gunz
Lecture:  F 1-3
Division:  III

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HIS 405Y1-Y Canadian Foreign Relations
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course - HIS405Y1/1142Y)

In the first term the course takes an in-depth look at topics in Canadian foreign policy, after 1945; including the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, and Vietnam. In the second term the topics will depend on the subjects students choose to write about for their major research essays.

Tentative Course Requirements: two seminar presentations, one historiography essay, one take-home test, and one major research paper. Participation is worth 30% of the grade; the remaining 70% is based on your written work.

PREREQUISITE: HIS311Y1/POL312Y1

Instructor: R. Bothwell
Seminar: W 10-12
Division: II

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HIS 411H1-S Great Trials in History

This course explores several great trials and their extended ramifications in close detail.  Using materials from the modern period in Europe and North America, we will look at the historical setting in which these proceedings were embedded, the clash of ideas, the human drama, legal and sometimes constitutional issues, the legal reasoning used by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges, and the impact of these trials both on their societies and our own.

Instructor: M. Marrus
Seminar: W 10-12
Division: III

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HIS 412Y1-Y Crusades, Conversion and Colonization in the Medieval Baltic
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course – HIS412Y1/1283H)

This year-long seminar will explore the impact of crusades, religious conversion and colonialization on medieval Baltic history.  The focus of the course will be on close reading and analysis of two medieval chronicles in English translation.  Our readings and discussions will include topics such as ‘culture clash’, medieval colonialism, Europeanization as well as German expansion eastwards, the role of the Teutonic Knights and the strategies of survival of the native Baltic people after conquest and Christianization.

Textbook(s):  The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia, 2003; The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, 1977.  Alan V. Murray (ed.), Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500.  Ashgate, 2001, and a package of readings compiled by instructor.

Tentative Course Requirements:  seminar presentations (30%), one major research paper in the spring term (50%), participation & attendance (20%).

Recommended Preparation:  one course in Medieval European History.

Instructor:  J. Kivimäe
Seminar:  R 5-7
Division:  III
Pre-Modern:  1 credit

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HIS 423H1-F The Social History of Medicine in the 19th and 20th Centuries
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course – HIS423H1/1269H)

The seminar, designed to inform students about developments in this new scholarly field, will include topics such as the evolution of the doctor-patient relationship, the impact of medical care upon health, the evolution of such medical specialities as internal medicine, neurology and psychiatry, the relationship between culture and the presentation of illness, and the history of medical therapeutics.

Textbook(s): Edward Shorter, Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History.

Tentative Course Requirements: A major research paper (60%), participation (40%).

PREREQUISITE: A minimum of one course in HIS/PSY/SOC

EXCLUSION: HIS423Y1

Instructor: E. Shorter
Seminar: R 4-6
Division: II

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HIS 424H1-S Violence in Medieval Society

This course explores the social meaning and functions of violence in medieval society and the ritual processes, laws and institutions utilized to control violence.  Students will read and discuss in seminar secondary literature in anthropology, social history, and legal history as well as selected primary source materials.  Topics include feud in Germanic and Icelandic societies; violence among the nobility; the peace and truce of God; chivalry; the development of criminal justice systems; violence and gender; violence against minorities.

Tentative Course Requirements:  Students will be evaluated on the basis of their contribution to seminar discussions, a short essay analysing a primary text, and a substantial research paper.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS220Y1/304Y1/320Y1/322Y1

EXCLUSION:  HIS424Y1

Instructor:  M. Meyerson
Seminar:  M 2-4
Division:  III

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HIS 430H1-F Canadians and the World Wars

This course examines a range of topics relating to Canadians’ experience during the First and Second World Wars.  Military matters and well as home front issues will be considered.  Canadian experiences will be placed in a wider, international context and companies will be made between the two wars.  Topics to be considered include: political leadership and divisions over conscription; war as a stimulus to social welfare measures; wartime propaganda, democracy, and the meaning of nation; the place of Canadians in the military campaigns of the allies; manliness and soldiers’ experiences of battle; wartime internment, conscientious objectors, and POWs; the growth of labour militancy and radicalism; women’s involvement in the military, war production, and patriotic movements; reconstruction planning and veterans’ re-establishment in civilian life; commemoration of the wars and conflicts about the meaning of war for later generations.

Tentative Course Requirements:  participation 20%, presentation 10%, 3 reading reports 10% each, and essay 40%.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS263Y1

Instructor:  I. Radforth
Seminar:  M 3-5
Division: I/II

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HIS 433H1-S Polish Jews Since the Partition of Poland
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS433H1/HIS 1287H)

The course will explore the history of Polish Jews from the Partitions of Poland to the present, concentrating on the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. It will examine the state policies toward Jews of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Poland; the rise of Jewish political movements; the life of Jewish shtetls in Christian neighbourhoods; changes in the economic position and cultural development of Jewish communities in Poland; and the impact of communism on Jewish life. Materials are in English. Primary sources in translation as well as secondary sources representing diverse interpretation and points of view will be analyzed.

PREREQUISITE: HIS208Y1/251Y1/permission of the instructor.

Instructor: P. Wróbel
Seminar: R 5-7
Division: III

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HIS 441H1-F Conversion & Christianities in the Early Modern Spanish World
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS441H1/1709H)

This seminar investigates religious conversion and the ways in which human allegiances and identities emerge and change in colonial settings.  Our readings and discussions will concentrate on the Spanish world between about the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries.  Principal settings will include the late medieval Spanish kingdoms, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, and the Philippines archipelago.  A few of our meetings will range even more broadly in the hope of awakening you to the wider historical frames in which our theme and period rest, and in search of interdisciplinary thinking tools for students of religious and cultural change.  Primary sources translated into English will inform discussions and secondary readings whenever possible, and visual images will also be considered.  There will be one seminar each week in the Fall semester.

Recommended Preparation:  HIS106Y1 or 291Y1 may be useful.

Instructor:  K. Mills
Seminar:  M 3-5
Division:  III
Pre-Modern:  1/2 credit

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HIS 444H1-S Topics in Jewish History: Witnesses of War: Jewish Children's Lives under the Nazis

This course will examine Jewish children’s experiences in Europe, from the Nazis rise to power in 1933, through the steps of persecution and genocide, and up to the Liberation and reconstruction of children’s lives during the postwar years.  It will draw upon several different kinds of sources—secondary historical sources, memoirs and diaries, novels, and films—as a means of not only of documenting children’s lives and the history of childhood, but also analyzing how children’s wartime experiences were remembered, represented, and commemorated. Though texts such as memoirs and diaries offer an invaluable and grassroots source to explore children’s (and adults’) daily lives and emotions, they also pose a series of methodological problems. As sources coloured by memory and time, do memoirs and oral testimonies obscure the historians’ ability to accurately capture children’s lives and experiences? How do the perspectives and memories of children serve as an opportunity—and a challenge—to document the history of European Jewry during the war? This class will focus on the experiences of Jewish children but we will also attend to the history of non-Jewish children under the Nazis more generally. In so doing, this course will explore the social and cultural history of the Nazi years, the history of childhood, and memory of the Holocaust.

HIS 446H1-S Gender & Slavery in the Atlantic World

The course examines the relationship between gender and the experience of slavery and emancipating several Atlantic world societies from the 17^th-19^th centuries.  Areas to be covered are the Caribbean, Brazil, the U.S. South, West and South Africa and Western Europe.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS245Y1/291Y1/294Y1/295Y1

EXCLUSION:  HIS446Y1

Instructor:  M. Newton
Seminar:  W 11-1
Division: I/II/III

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HIS 448H1-S Gender in East and Southeast Asia

This course explores the history of gender in East and Southeast Asia from a comparative perspective.  It will examine how models of Southeast Asian women have been constructed against their East Asian counterparts.

PREREQUISTE:  HIS283Y1

EXCLUSION:  HIS391H1

Instructor:  N. Tran
Seminar:  M 4-6
Division:  I

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HIS 449Y1-Y Ukranian National Revival

The role of the intelligentsia in East European national revivals; the ethnographic and literary revival; the language question; the press and cultural organizations; education; religion; and political movements.

Recommended preparation:  One of the following: JHP204Y1/HIS241H1/HIS251Y1/HIS445H1

Instructor: P. Magocsi
Seminar: W 3-5
Division: III

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HIS 451H1-F World War II in East Central Europe
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS451H1/1297H)

The trajectory of Canadian history has been (and continues to be) shaped significantly by the changing relationships between Indigenous nations and newcomers.  Through discussion of readings on the following seminar topics, we will explore the multi-faceted contours of these relationships: experiences of early encounter; the establishment of alliance relationships beginning in the 17^th century; European efforts to missionize; the establishment of an Indigenous-European fur trade; the emergence of the Métis as a distinct cultural tradition; analysis of changing 18^th and 19^th century British colonial-era policy toward Indigenous peoples; analysis of Dominion of Canada policies including the Indian Act and the impact of the residential schools program, 20^th century federal policies, gender and colonization; political empowerment and cultural revitalization; the influence of museums and universities in shaping public opinion, RCAP, Ipperwash, and contemporary issues.

Tentative Course Requirements:  seminar discussion participation (40%), a book review or museum exhibit review assignment (20%) and a major historiography review essay (40%).

Recommended Preparation:  a background in Canadian history or Aboriginal Studies.

PREREQUISITES:  HIS262Y1/263Y1

Instructor:  H. Bohaker
Seminar:  R 4-6
Division:  II

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HIS 476H1-S Voices from Black America

The history of black Americas seen through the eyes of some of the men and women who experienced it.  Attention will be given to slavery but most of the sources will deal with the twentieth century.  We will look principally at both fiction and non-fiction and view movies.  The individuals studied will come from diverse walks of life and may include social activists, writers, musicians, athletes, actors, filmmakers, and politicians.  Gender relations will be a central concern and there will be equal attention given to works by men and women.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS271Y1

EXCLUSION:  HIS476Y1

Instructor:  M. Wayne
Seminar:  F 11-12:30
Division:  II

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HIS 478H1-S Hellhound on My Trail:  Living the Blues in the Mississippi Delta, 1890-1945

This course examines black like and culture in the cotton South through the medium of the blues.  While the postbellum South has received an inordinate amount of scholarly attention in the last thirty years, its rich historiography still tends to depict blacks as both passive victims and (historically speaking) inarticulate pawns in a system designed and controlled by whites.  By focusing on African American life through the blues, this course seeks to restore a voice and a sense of agency to black southerners in the age of Jim Crow.  The blues tradition that originated in the Mississippi Delta was closely tied to the social conditions, concerns, and conflict among the rural black population.  It is thus an ideal source of the historian seeking to tap the thought and spirit of a community that scholars have written about but rarely through.

Tentative Course Requirements:  tutorials (25%), journal (25%) and final project (50%)

Recommended Preparation:  HIS271Y1/USA300H1

Instructor:  N. Cardon
Seminar:  W 6-8
Division:  II

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The role of elite women in twentieth-century Africa has been overshadowed by studies of non-elite women so much as to suggest that all women lacked power.  This course aims to show how a very limited but important group of women negotiated power in a century of increasing patriarchy.  It combines gender with class analysis.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS295H1/296Y1/383H1/396Y1 or permission of instructor.

Instructor:  N. Musisi
Lecture:  M 2-4
Division:  I

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HIS 487H1-F Animal and Human Rights

Examines the parallel discourses of animal and human rights in Anglo-American culture from the eighteenth century to the present. The course explores issues of subjectivity and consciousness as well as cruelty and pain. Topics include slavery and abolition, animal welfare and antivivisection, anti-colonial liberation movements, and animal rights campains.

Recommended Preparation: HIS296Y1

Instructor: S. Hawkins
Lecture: R 2-4
Division: II

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HIS 488H1-F The Secret War, 1939-45

This course analyses the critical part played by the Allies’ secret intelligence services in the defeat of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan during the Second World War.  The uniquely important contribution made by Britain’s secret warriors to the common victory over international fascism will be highlighted, especially the way in which their successes in codebreaking and the running of double-agents enabled the Allies to practise deception at the strategic level for the first time in the history of warfare.

Texts:  Students will be provided with an extensive bibliography to assist them in the preparation of essays and seminar papers, and may also consult the following:  F.H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, one vol. abridged ed.; F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripps (eds), Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park; Michael Howard, Strategic Deception; David Kahn, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence in the Second World War; John Masterman, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939-1945.

Tentative Course Requirements:  essay (50%), seminar paper (20% each), seminar presentation (15%), seminar participation (15%).

PREREQUISITE:  Any two courses from: EUR200Y1/HIS103Y1/241H1/242H1/343Y1/344Y1

EXCLUSION: HIS488Y1

Instructor:  D. Smyth
Seminar:  M 4-6
Division:  III

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HIS 489H1-F The History of Psychiatry and Psychiatric Illness
(Joint undergraduate/graduate course HIS489H1/1270H)

This course introduces students to some of the main issues in the history of psychiatry. Classroom discussion will cover such topics as changes in the nature of psychotic illness, the psychoneuroses, disorders of the mind/body relationship, psychiatric diagnosis and the “presentation” of illness.

Textbook(s): required text for the course will be Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry from the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac.

Tentative Course Requirements: major research paper (60%), participation (40%).

PREREQUISITE: a minimum of one course in HIS/PSY/SOC

EXCLUSION: HIS423Y1

Instructor: E. Shorter
Seminar: F 10-12
Division: III

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HIS 490H1-F Everyday Stalinism

This seminar explores issues of everyday life in Soviet Russia during the Stalin era.  What was the “Soviet normal”?  Topics will include belief systems, dreams and myths, terror, fear, repression, and resistance.  Texts include a range of different sources, memoirs, diaries, official state documents, and secondary sources.

PREREQUISITE:  HIS351Y1 (grade of B+ or higher)/HIS250Y1 (grade of A)

Instructor:  L. Viola
Seminar:  M 3-5
Division:  III

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HIS 496H1-F, L0101 Topics in History: Columbian Exchange: Ecological Adaptation & Invasion in the Early Modern Atlantic World

This course will introduce students to the ecological history of the Early Modern Atlantic World and will specifically address the increased circulation of plants, animals and diseases that followed the European “discovery” of the Americas that are collectively know as the Columbian Exchange. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 was among the first to draw attention to the tremendous ecological upheaval that followed European overseas expansion in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the 35 years since it was published, Crosby’s work has inspired a whole generation of scholars to flesh out the history of contact and colonialism with an attention to the importance of nonhuman agents, be they sheep, smallpox or potatoes. Assigned readings will provide an entry into this literature and will trace the human and non-human dimensions of the exchange, balancing a focus on the trajectories of individual plants, animals and diseases with a broader focus on the cultures within which exchanged objects were understood and the varied means by which items were circulated and diffused throughout the Atlantic World. The ultimate goal will be to understand the Columbian Exchange as a facet of the larger history of the Early Modern Atlantic World and European expansion.

Instructor:  C. Parsons
Lecture:  M 11-1
Division:  II

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HIS 496H1-S, L0101 Topics in History: The Material World of 19th Century Childhood

HIS 496H1-S, L0201 Topics in History: Rupture and Repair: Understanding and Responding to Genocide and Mass Crime

This seminar will lead students through an exploration of the explanations for and responses to genocide and mass crime. Drawing on scholarship from history, social psychology, religion, and law, the course will introduce students to key themes such as the commonalities and differences between instances of genocide in Europe and Africa; accounts of how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil; the role of religion in both provoking and limiting genocidal violence; and judicial responses to mass trauma. The seminar will be conducted on the basis of class discussion of assigned readings. These readings will frequently present students with differing interpretations of the issues. Apart from deepening students' understanding of complex and controversial problems, the objectives of the seminar also include deepening and refining students' analytical and oral and written communication skills.

Instructor: TBA
Seminar: W 10-12
Division: I/III

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HIS 498H1-F/S/499Y1-YIndependent Studies Courses

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