Classes

Modern life is defined by our use of energy: fossil fuels, hydroelectricity, nuclear power, renewables. These forms of energy power modern economies, politics, and everyday life. They heat and cool our homes, cook our food, enable our work, and illuminate the device you are...

This course examines how one of the most important but least studied empires of the modern world reshaped the culture and politics of East Asia. By the early 1940s the Japanese empire encompassed some 200 million subjects, stretching from the cold northern woods of Sakhalin...

The future is not what it used to be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural world, where climate change and fading biodiversity, energy anxieties, and environmental disasters have undermined the bedrock of history: the assumption of a stable continuity between...

Everything has a history. The food that we eat, the heat that warms us, the gardens we pass through, the buildings that give us shelter all bring us into complex, vital relationships with the past. This course converts the Radcliffe Quad into a laboratory for the exploration...

The future is not what it used to be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural world, where limate change and fading biodiversity, energy anxieties, and environmental disasters have underminded the bedrock of history: the assumption of a stable continuity between...

This course explores the role of Japanese imperialism in teh making of modern East Asia. By the 1940s Japan's empire stretched from the cold northern woods of Sakhalin Island to Taiwan, Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. We use the analysis of this world-historical force to...

This course is a critical introduction to the history of energy. What roles has energy played in the creation and destruction of societies, cultures, and economies? How have different forms of energy—biomass, coal, oil, electricity, nuclear, renewables—influenced historical...

The future is not what it used to be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural world, where climate change and fading biodiversity, energy anxieties, and environmental disasters have undermined the bedrock of history: the assumption of a stable continuity between...

This seminar is a critical introduction to the history and historiography of energy, a field entangled with the history of fossil-fueled climate change. We will work our way back into the history of energy, using theories of energy to rethink such key issues as...

The history of energy is the history of modern political economy. The history of energy is the history of a scientific concept and its technological application. The history of energy is the history of climate change and environmental catastrophe. The history of energy is...

A critical exploration of history's "environmental turn." This course tracks the movement of environmental themes to the center of the discipline and the emergence of environmental history as an important new subfield. Readings will range from classics to cutting-edge new...

This section gives new History concentrators an introduction to environmental history. Most historians leave the natural world out of the story, but environmental historians regard nature as the inescapable context for human history, including the human impact on nature. We...