Go to: Division of History and Social Sciences  

Faculty

Michael P. Breen
Old Regime France; medieval and early modern European legal, social, and cultural history; Renaissance Italy. On sabbatical 2023-24.

Jacqueline Dirks
American social and cultural history, United States women’s history.

David T. Garrett
Latin America and early modern Spain.

Joshua P. Howe
Environmental history, history of science, twentieth-century United States.

Benjamin Lazier
Modern Europe, intellectual history.

Liz Matsushita
African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian history and humanities.

Mary Ashburn Miller
Revolutionary-era France and Europe, modern European cultural and intellectual history.

Margot Minardi
Colonial and revolutionary America, nineteenth-century United States.

Radhika Natarajan
Modern imperial Britain.

Padraig Riley
Nineteenth-century United States, slavery, political history.

Xue Zhang
Modern and early modern China, nineteenth-century Qing empire, Chinese frontiers.

Curriculum

At Reed, history is treated as a basic component of general education. The department attempts to include in its course offerings as many periods and areas of study as student enrollment and available faculty make possible. The priority, however, is on diversity of approach-constitutional, intellectual, economic, social, diplomatic, cultural-rather than on specific coverage of conventional fields. The aim is to arouse sufficient interest in history to stimulate a student’s independent inquiry and the necessary analytical thought and perspectives that go with historical study.

The department tries to inculcate students with a sense of history-to impress them with the legacy, conscious or unconscious, that each present has inherited from its past, as well as the many perspectives one can have on that legacy. While many graduates have become prominent as professional historians and teachers of history, it is even more as a fundamental contribution to liberal, humanistic education and the development of a critical intelligence, carried through in many different professions and ways of life, that the department program is conceived and directed to majors and nonmajors alike.

The department expects students to develop competence in various periods and areas of history, as specified in the course requirements below, and to attain analytical skills common to all fields of history. The junior qualifying examination in history requires students to analyze a significant piece of recent scholarship in the discipline. The examination is offered once each semester, in conjunction with the junior seminar. Students in the major ordinarily take the exam in the first four weeks of the semester in which they are enrolled in Junior Seminar (HIST 411 ). The department encourages but does not require its students to pursue the study of a foreign language.

For students who wish to pursue interdisciplinary study in American history and some other area-for example, literature, economics, or government-Reed offers an American Studies  major. Among other possible programs are interdisciplinary majors involving history, such as History/Literature  and International and Comparative Policy Studies with a Concentration in History , Environmental Studies with a Concentration in History , or Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies with a Concentration in History .  

Note: 300-level history courses are ordinarily open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and to first-year students only with the consent of the instructor.

Programs

• History

Courses

• HIST 205 - The Twentieth-Century Middle East through Music
• HIST 206 - Anti-Colonial Movements in Africa and the Middle East
• HIST 210 - Educating Americans in the Long Nineteenth Century
• HIST 220 - Late Imperial China
• HIST 223 - Early Modern China and the World: 1300-1900
• HIST 224 - Modern China through Foreign Eyes: 1800-1980
• HIST 231 - Crime and Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• HIST 240 - World Environmental History
• HIST 251 - Slander, Censorship, and Surveillance in Modern European History
• HIST 256 - Migration Histories in the British Imperial World
• HIST 270 - Introduction to American Environmental History
• HIST 271 - U.S. Politics and Culture, 1964-2004
• HIST 272 - Gender and the American Family
• HIST 282 - The Mexican Revolution
• HIST 283 - Latin America and the United States
• HIST 284 - Latinx History in the United States
• HIST 286 - Histories of Immigration and Migration in the United States
• HIST 303 - The History of the Sahara
• HIST 307 - War and Peace in Europe, 1700-1914
• HIST 310 - Water and the American West
• HIST 313 - Wildlife in America
• HIST 315 - Defining and Defying Difference: Race, Ethnicity, and Empire
• HIST 317 - The American Earth: U.S. Environmental History in the Twentieth Century
• HIST 320 - Merchants and Mariners on the Water Frontier, 1400-1820
• HIST 322 - China’s Frontiers since 1600
• HIST 323 - Rice in East Asia
• HIST 325 - History of Technologies in Imperial and Modern China: 1500-2000
• HIST 329 - Cameras and Photography in Nineteenth-Century East Asia
• HIST 334 - Race and the Politics of Decolonization
• HIST 335 - Development: An Imperial History
• HIST 338 - Crisis & Catastrophe in Modern Europe
• HIST 341 - An Intellectual History of Animality
• HIST 343 - The Human Condition
• HIST 344 - Freud and the Psychoanalytic Tradition
• HIST 345 - Whole Earths, Globalizations, and World Pictures
• HIST 355 - Heretics, Witches, and Inquisitors: Deviance, Orthodoxy, and the Law in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• HIST 362 - Revolutionary America
• HIST 363 - American Social Reform from Revolution to Reconstruction
• HIST 369 - Race and the Law in American History
• HIST 370 - The Tragedies of American Diplomacy: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1893
• HIST 372 - U.S. Women’s History, 1890-1990
• HIST 374 - Gender and Sex
• HIST 375 - Hannah Arendt and Origins of Totalitarianism
• HIST 376 - The United States in the 1970s
• HIST 379 - The Fifties in America
• HIST 381 - Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. since 1865
• HIST 383 - Race and Oral Histories in the United States
• HIST 386 - The Incas
• HIST 388 - Race and Ethnicity in the Andes
• HIST 389 - Labor in Modern Latin America
• HIST 390 - Music and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1965
• HIST 392 - The Hellenistic World: Egypt, the Middle East, and Central Asia after Alexander the Great
• HIST 393 - The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic
• HIST 394 - The Athenians and the “Other”
• HIST 397 - Women in the Ancient World
• HIST 411 - Junior Seminar
• HIST 421 - Topics in Historiography
• HIST 470 - Thesis
• HIST 481 - Individual Study