Social History

Until the twentieth century, historians focused mainly on elites: those with the means to record their own experiences in publications, letters, diaries, and official documents. This method tended to produce historical narratives in which change was understood to come from those in positions of political, economic, and social power. Social history, in contrast, seeks to understand change from the bottom up—by focusing on the lived experiences of many types of people in the past, with special attention to those who found themselves in oppressive situations. Social historians often focus on class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, geography, and other categories which have constrained and shaped human experience. Social historians at Harvard work across a wide variety of time periods, populations, methods, and sources, but their work seeks to answer the same basic question:  what did people do with the resources, material, symbolic, cultural, legal (etc.)  that they had in order to advance their interests or achieve their goals within the constraints imposed on them by their context? 

FACULTY

• Emmanuel Akyeampong: Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies;
• Sven Beckert: Laird Bell Professor of History
• Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham: Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studie
• Vincent Brown: Charles Warren Professor of American History; Professor of African and African American Studies
• Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law; Professor of History 
• Sidney Chalhoub: Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
• Lizabeth Cohen: Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies
• Mark Elliott: Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History
• Alejandro de la Fuente: Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History
• Arunabh Ghosh: Associate Professor of History
• Andrew Gordon: Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History
• Annette Gordon-Reed: Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Harvard Law School; Professor of History
• Tamar Herzog: Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs; Radcliffe Alumnae Professor
• Alison Frank Johnson: Professor of History
• Walter Johnson: Winthrop Professor of History; Professor of African and African American Studies
• Cemal Kafadar: Vehbi Koç Professor of Turkish Studies
• Jane Kamensky: Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History
• Jill Lepore: David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History
• Mary Lewis: Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History
• Michael McCormick: Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History; Chair, Science of the Human Past
• Lisa McGirr: Professor of History
• Kenneth Mack: Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law
• Charles Maier: Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Emeritus
• Afsaneh Najmabadi: Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
• Intisar Rabb: Professor of Law; Professor of History
• Emma Rothschild: Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History
• Daniel Lord Smail: Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History
• Michael Szonyi: Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: 300th Anniversary University Professor, Emerita
• Kirsten Weld: Professor of History

(Courses offered by History Department faculty automatically count for the History concentration)

Fall 2020:

• FS 71P: Making Places and Spaces in Modern America
• GENED 1002: The Democracy Project
• HIST 14M: “Black Indians”: History, Identity, and Theory
• HIST 74N: U.S. History: Major Themes in the Twentieth Century
• HIST 84H: The Northern Side of the Civil Rights Movement
• HIST 1028: Race, Capitalism, and the Coming of the Civil War
• HIST 1265: German History: A User’s Guide
• HIST 1852: The Game: College Sports as History
• HIST 1908: Racial Capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition
• HIST 1931: Slavery Disease, and Race: Brazil in the Atlantic World
• HIST 2050: Medieval Societies and Cultures: Proseminar
• 2008A: Jewish History as World History: Graduate Readings Seminar
• HIST 2463: Graduate Readings in 20th-Century African-American History: Seminar

Spring 2021:

• FS 63M: War Stories: Looking at War Through the Tales We Tell
• FS 72E: That Seventies Seminar: Discovering a Decade that Made America
• GENED 1014: Ancestry
• GENED 1044: Deep History
• HIST 12K: Arabs, Jews, and “Arab Jews” in the Modern Middle East
• HIST 12L: Power and Protest: U.S. Social Movements in the 1960s and 1970s
• HIST 13C: St. Louis from Lewis and Clark to Michael Brown
• HIST 80G: Travelers to Byzantium
• HIST 97H: “What is Urban History”
• HIST 1002: The 20th Century United States: Politics, Society, Culture
• HIST 1004: Modern Europe, 1789 to the Present
• HIST 1015: Native American Women: History and Myth
• HIST 1433: History of American Populisms
• HIST 1636: Intro to Harvard History: Beyond The Three Lies
• HIST 1930: Literature and Social History: A View from Brazil
• HIST 1937: Social Revolutions in Latin America
• HIST 1955: Abolitionist Women and Their Worlds

Past Course Offerings in Social History:

• AFRAMER 103Y: Histories of Racial Capitalism 
• AFRAMER 118: The History of African-Americans from the Slave Trade to the Civil War
• AFRAMER 191X: African American Lives in the Law
• CHNSHIS 113: Society and Culture of Late Imperial China
• EASTD 129: The World of the Three Kingdoms
• FRSEMR 61M: Silk Road Stories
• FRSEMR 71P: Making Places and Spaces in Modern America
• HIST 12A: Communal Life through the Ages: Monasteries, Cults & Collectives
• HIST 12B: Identity before Identity Politics: America in the Progressive Era
• HIST 12C: Out of the Vault: Material Culture and Harvard's Collection
• HIST 13D: Iran's Revolutions 
• HIST 13E: History of Modern Mexico
• HIST 13N: American Immigration
• HIST 13U: Asian Diasporas in Global History
• HIST 13X: Europe and Its Others: From the Enlightenment to the European Union
• HIST 13Y: World War II through Soviet Eyes
• HIST 13Z: Liberty and Slavery: The British Empire and the American Revolution
• HIST 14A: The Medieval Mediterranean: Conflict and Unity, Tradition and Innovation
• HIST 14C: Tell Old Pharaoh: Histories of “Contraband Camps” and Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era
• HIST 14F: Cities and Urban Life in Latin American History 
• HIST 14G: Race and Nation in Latin America 
• HIST 14I: American Food, A Global History: More Than Just a Meal
• HIST 14K: Oil and Empire
• HIST 14M: "Black Indians": The Making of an Identity
• HIST 14N: The Uses and Abuses of the Past: History in American Public Life
• HIST 14O: A Global History of Modern Jewish Migration
• HIST 43C: Human Rights and the Global South
• HIST 74N: U.S. History: Major Themes in the Twentieth Century
• HIST 82F: The Origins of the Cold War: The Yalta Conference (1945)
• HIST 84G: Harvard and Slavery
• HIST 84H: The Northern Side of the Civil Rights Movement
• HIST 89A: British Colonial Violence in the 20th Century
• HIST 97J: "What is Family History?"
• HIST 97K: “What Is Social History?” 
• HIST 1001: The War in Vietnam
• HIST 1002: The 20th Century Unites States: Politics, Society, Culture
• HIST 1003: (Un)Happy Days: The United States in the Great Depression and New Deal
• HIST 1006: Native American and Indigenous Studies: An Introduction
• HIST 1008: The State of Israel in Comparative Perspective
• HIST 1015: Native American Women: History and Myth
• HIST 1018: Coffee and the Nighttime: History and Politics, 1400–2020
• HIST 1020: The Russian and Chinese Revolutions
• HIST 1028: Race, Capitalism, and the Coming of the Civil War
• HIST 1032: A History of Brazil, from Independence to the Present
• HIST 1034: Modern Latin America, 1800-Present
• HIST 1035: Byzantine Civilization
• HIST 1039: First Empires: Power and Propaganda in the Ancient World
• HIST 1046: Islamicate Societies to 1500
• HIST 1050: Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Atlantic World
• HIST 1053: After Catastrophe: Europe since 1945
• HIST 1059: Deep History
• HIST 1206: Empire, Nation, and Immigration in France since 1870
• HIST 1240: Artifacts of the Russian Empire
• HIST 1281: The End of Communism
• HIST 1433: History of American Populisms
• HIST 1602: Modern China
• HIST 1623: Japan in the Modern World
• HIST 1636: Intro to Harvard History: Beyond the Three Lies
• HIST 1700: The History of Sub-Saharan Africa to 1860
• HIST 1900: Feminisms and Pornography, c. 1975-1995 
• HIST 1907: Germans and Jews
• HIST 1918: Readings on the U.S. Civil War
• HIST 1924: Violence, Substances, and Mental Illness: African Perspectives
• HIST 1930: Literature and Social History: A View from Brazil
• HIST 1931: Slavery, Disease and Race: A View from Brazil
• HIST 1937: Social Revolutions in Latin America
• HIST 1943: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock: Indigenous Political Struggle Since 1890
• HIST 1944: Race, Indigeneity, and Empire in the Asia/Pacific Wars, 1898-Present
• HIST 1945: Slavery and Public History 
• HIST 1946: Syria: History, Politics, and Religion
• HIST 1949: Race, Gender, and U.S. Militarism
• HIST 1950: Beyond 'The End of History': Rethinking Europe's Long Twentieth Century, 1900–2018
• HIST 1954: Jews and the City: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Urban History
• HIST 1959: The People's Republic of China and the World
• HIST 2955A: History of Global Capitalism: Seminar  
• JAPNHIST 115: Religion and Society in Edo and Meiji Japan
• SOCIOL 189: Democracy and Social Movements in East Asia
• US-WORLD 26: Sex and the Citizen: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the US
• US-WORLD 30: Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History
• US-WORLD 38: Forced to be Free: Americans as Occupiers and Nation-Builders
• US-WORLD 41: Power and Protest: The United States in the World of the 1960s
• US-WORLD 43: Ancestry
• WOMGEN 1270: Gender, Violence, and Power
• WOMGEN 1281: Hysterical Women: A History
• WOMGEN 1407: Harlots, Dandies, Bluestockings: Sexuality, Gender, and Feminism in the 18th and 19th Centuries
• WOMGEN 1441: The Sexual Life of Colonialism 

*Please be sure to check the Courses section of the History Website for more information on which of these courses count towards the History concentration and secondary field. Also, while we endeavor to keep this list current, it may not reflect all courses actually offered.*