Louis Warren is the W. Turrentine Jackson  Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches environmental history, the history of the American West, and U.S. history

"The Rising of God's Red Son:  The Ghost Dance Religion and the Dawn of the Twentieth...

In this seminar we will discuss and seek to complicate frequently held assumptions about the particular characteristics of state power in history. How have states exercised their coercive powers in distinct historical moments and in different places? Why and how have some states exercised highly "legible" forms of power while in other places state power has remained less visible?  How useful is it to characterize some states as strong and others as weak when we know that "strong" states have been weak in significant ways and states often understood as weak have exercised colossal...

Sponsored by the Harvard History Department, the Harvard German Department, the German Science Foundation (DFG) and the Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf), an interdisciplinary two-place conference on Historicizing Ignorance in Late Medieval and Early Modern History will take place at Harvard University, Robinson Hall and the German Historical Institute, Paris.

The conference seeks to address how ignorance about phenomena in different epistemic fields of the late medieval and early modern world was recognized (or not), used and coped with, differently from modern times. The Harvard part...

Download the schedule (pdf)

Department of History Seminar

 How Are States Violent?

 We take it for granted that states are or can be violent. To ask how are states violent highlights the instrumentalities of violence and coercion. The variation in these instrumentalities, in turn, opens up...

“Renoir” (2012), introduced by Prof. Patrice Higonnet

Movie plot:  Set on the French Riviera in the summer of 1915, Jean Renoir – son of the Impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste -- returns...

Derek Penslar, Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish History, University of Toronto
"Jews, Military Service, and the State".

James Loeffler, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia
"The Sovereignty of a Higher Law?:Global Antisemitism and Jewish Politics in the 1960s."

Abigail Green, Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford
“Liberalism and the Jews c.1848-1948.”

Closed session. Only Harvard Community may attend.

Senior Thesis Conference

This year the History Department's annual Senior Thesis Writer's Conference will be held Thursday and Friday, November 5th and 6th, 2015. At this event our honors seniors will present their works in progress to audiences of faculty and graduate students. These thesis writers will present their projects as members of three-to-four person panels moderated by a faculty member or advanced graduate student. Their aim is to get the critical and...

“The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley: Gender, Biography, and Ambivalent Revolutions”

Jane Kamensky is currently the Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of...

“Only the Clothes on Her Back:  Women, Textiles, and National Development in the Nineteenth-Century United States”

Laura Edwards is a Professor of History at Duke...

What's 'Woman' Got to Do with It? Rethinking the History of American Activism

Annelise Orleck is Professor of History at Dartmouth College.