Sophomore Research Seminar: 2010-11

This course will examine slavery in the United States with a focus on the 19th century. In the first half of the course students will read some of the classic works on slavery in order to familiarize themselves with how historians have talked about slavery to this point. They will then spend the second half of the course researching and writing a term paper based on primary sources (newspapers, slave narratives, etc.). Specifically, students will be asked to develop a thesis based on this primary research addressing the topic of slave resistance. They are to not only develop an original argument, but also situate this argument within the existing literature on the topic.

Think about things you use every day: your DVD player. A microwave oven. A restaurant menu. Your iPod. A paper clip. A roadmap. A webpage. These things all have one thing in common -- their designers tried to make them useful. Some succeed. Some don't. This sophomore seminar focuses on good design: how to do it, how to recognize it, and especially how to evaluate alternatives. Using texts such as Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, we'll explore the process of design by drawing on your experience and interest in a wide range of fields. In cross-disciplinary terms, you'll design new usable systems, evaluate systems through hands-on experiments, and present your results in both oral and written form.

This SRS will explore many issues surrounding the history and practice of ethics in biomedical research. Topics and cases include: Nuremberg to Jesse Gelsinger; ethical theory and the ethical dimensions of biomedical research; the physician’s role in research; the Belmont Report, informed consent; altruism as motive to enroll in research; the therapeutic misconception; the stages of research clinical trials, the problem of RCTs (Randomized Clinical Trials); trust in medicine and trust in biomedical research; performing research in developing countries. Readings will be drawn from a textbook on biomedical ethics, from online sources (e.g. the American Medical Association), as well as academic journals and books. Time permitting, other bioethical topics may be considered.

On the Fourth of July 1861, President Abraham Lincoln characterized the conflict dividing the North and South as "a people's contest" to determine whether the U.S. would have a government "whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men." In the ensuing 140+ years, historians have studied not only how the Civil War tested the country's political principles but also how people on and off of the battlefield -- women and men, enslaved and free, native and foreign born, northern and southern -- experienced and understood their roles in the war. Students in this SRS will pursue research in printed and on-line Civil War diaries, letters, newspapers, and speeches to explore how gender and race were integral to the "people's contest" and its outcome.

Arguably no people in the world are more in love with their cars than Americans. Certainly no country's real estate, livelihood, and life have been more reshaped by the automobile than those of the United States, in the course of little more than a century. Our seminar will explore when, how, and why the automobile came to so dominate our society and how that dominance in American transportation affects our entire culture. Accordingly, our common readings, other course material, and class discussions will cover varied topics, including the changing science and engineering of cars, the economics of the industry, the rise of mass production and later niche marketing, design and aesthetics, the reshaping of urban and rural landscapes and life (with a focus on Schenectady), the changing politics of transportation, the rise of General Motors and other large companies, the youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s with its "car songs" and movies, and views of the auto by its critics and by mainstream media. Each student will start from these readings and his or her own interests and work with actively with both the instructor and a librarian to find a topic for which a 12-18 page research paper is feasible and relevant and to complete the research and writing. Each student will participate in class discussions; summarize two key book chapters, articles, or other sources to be used in the research paper; make a brief report on his or her topic to the class around the middle of the term; and lead a discussion in class based on the first complete draft of the paper sometime during the last three weeks of the term. There will be no examinations, though I do reserve the right to give quizzes or ask for a few one-page "microthemes" to aid class preparation. If a joint poster session can be arranged with several other SRS sections, each student also will make a poster describing his or her work and participate in the poster session.

Virtually every society has its favorite drugs. We all consume them – for aches and pains, for pleasure and recreation, to alter mood, to wake us up, to help us sleep, and to mark important occasions, among other things – but cultural, economic, and political factors determine whether those drugs are considered beneficial or dangerous, are freely obtained or regulated, etc. Our goal here is to examine several drugs over time and in particular geographical and cultural contexts to analyze how and why those factors emerged and interacted, as well as how they affected popular attitudes. We will focus primarily on opiates, but will touch on other drugs such as caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco.

The focus of the course is the history of Cuba from the 1959 triumph of a revolution led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, through the several decade-long period in which Cuba was the site of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, and into the current decades since the end of the Cold War and emergence of Cuba as an influential, non-aligned socialist state. The course will examine changes within Cuba in revolutionary ideology, problems of scarcity and tensions among different sectors of Cuban society, gender and race relations, economic and political relations with the U.S., Latin America, and the rest of the world.

Seminar participants will present at least one oral report in class, based on an assigned reading, will write a research paper based on both primary and secondary sources, and will be expected to participate actively in evaluating the work of their classmates and in revising their own work based on suggestions from others in the class.

This course will explore the history of European colonial rule in Africa from the period of exploration and conquest during the 19th century to the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. The course will explore different interpretations of imperialism and colonialism, through a careful examination of case studies drawn from diverse colonial contexts. Topics will include technology and empire, colonial warfare, colonial occupation and African resistance, colonial government and economics, and religious and cultural change under colonialism. The central questions for the course will be: How and why did Africans lose control over their lands following the wars of conquest? What impact did European colonialism have on Africa? How did colonial states manage to stay in power?

The course will be structured as a seminar, which means the focus will be on the discussion of readings. Furthermore, we will spend considerable time focused on student research projects.

Students will read two conflicting accounts (Into Thin Air, and The Climb) of the 1996 mountaineering tragedy on Mt. Everest, along with key papers from cognitive psychology regarding human perception, memory, performance and reasoning. Class discussions and assignments will focus on understanding and resolving key conflicts between the two accounts as well as understanding the causes of the tragedy by applying the findings from the key papers from cognitive psychology.

This seminar will examine one of the most important events in modern history, the revolution in France at the end of the eighteenth century that toppled and guillotined a King, unleashed war throughout Europe, experienced a radical democratic government that culminated in a Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon. Along with political developments, this seminar will also cover examples from economic, intellectual and gender history. Reading will include primary sources -- letters, speeches, reports, and images -- and selections from secondary accounts--articles and books written by historians. Students will both interpret the primary sources for themselves, and compare and contrast how various historians have written this history.

The Cold War as an historical event is arguably responsible for most of the critical issues and theories that serve as the foundation of international relations research today. These include the quests to reduce state conflict, eliminate nuclear weapons, and develop international multilateralism, as well as the examinations of globalization, the hurdles facing global economic development, and the foundations of current U.S. hegemony. Ultimately the Cold War served as a crucible for the modern study of international relations and as such deserves particular attention in the development of individual understandings and approaches to the field. The goal of this course will be to utilize the political and theoretical developments of the period as a backdrop for the introduction of critical research skills that undergraduate students will need moving forward in their academic careers. Particular attention will be paid to research design methods, as well as the interaction between theory and policy creation. Some of the readings being considered are: Edward E. Judge and John W. Langdon's (eds), "The Cold War: A History Through Documents" (1998); John Lewis Gaddis. "The Cold War: A New History" (2006); and Odd Arne Westad "The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times" (2007). The book which will guide the methodological component of the course is Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams "The Craft of Research - 2nd Edition" (2003).

This SRS will explore many issues surrounding the history and practice of ethics in biomedical research. Topics and cases include: Nuremberg to Jesse Gelsinger; ethical theory and the ethical dimensions of biomedical research; the physician’s role in research; the Belmont Report, informed consent; altruism as motive to enroll in research; the therapeutic misconception; the stages of research clinical trials, the problem of RCTs (Randomized Clinical Trials); trust in medicine and trust in biomedical research; performing research in developing countries. Readings will be drawn from a textbook on biomedical ethics, from online sources (e.g. the American Medical Association), as well as academic journals and books. Time permitting, other bioethical topics may be considered.

This class begins with what some consider the most politically important book published in the U.S. after the Second World War, Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. After reading and discussing the text in its entirety, the class will work historically through Friedan's sources, in the vast "archive" of popular magazines, TV shows, films and advertising of the late 1940s through early 1960s. The class will then read some of the literature that responded to and elaborated on Friedan's argument and comprised the "Second Wave" of American feminism. We will also look at some of the literature from the era critical of Friedan's approach. Research projects will use Life, Time, Ladies Home Journal, House Beautiful and other magazines in Schaffer and Schenectady public library, as well as other cultural artifacts to reassess Freidan's conclusions about the effects, extent and nature of the "feminine mystique." Work will be evaluated in stages -- research design and proposal, outline of paper, first draft and final draft. Assigned texts for the class will include (besides Friedan's) a collection of selections from magazines and women's literature (as preparatory to the process of archival investigation), a book of oral history and memoire on the early years of second wave feminism and a book of feminist writing of the next generation of feminists.

This course will examine the history of African-American protest movements. Students will learn in rough outline about African-American struggles for freedom from the earliest slave revolts to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. We will examine such struggles as Gabriel's Rebellion (considered perhaps the largest slave conspiracy in Southern history), abolitionism (with a focus on the strategies of David Walker, Martin Delaney, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass), the anti-lynching movement, Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, W.E.B. DuBois and the Niagara Movement, Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance, the struggle to integrate sports such as boxing and baseball, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, and the Black Power Movement. Students will write a research paper on the movement of their choice.

This research seminar will focus on the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens in the United States during World War II. This topic offers the chance to explore a variety of important historical issues with contemporary resonance: the tension between national security and civil liberties during wartime, the impact of racism on the shaping of American wartime policy, ethnic identity and assimilation in the United States, resistance and accommodation by minorities facing discrimination, and the evolution of American attitudes toward past injustices. We will address these issues by examining a wide range of types of primary sources, including government documents, newspapers, legal documents, photographs, camp newsletters, oral histories, and memoirs.

In this seminar, we will study the life and career of Julius Caesar, a general who conquered Gaul, a politician who dominated the state, and a religious reformer who, even before his famous assassination on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., was worshipped in some places as a god on Earth. How do we separate facts from legend and fiction in such an extraordinary career? We shall begin with a close reading of ancient sources, including biographies (e.g., The Divine Julius by Suetonius), letters and speeches (Cicero), historical accounts (e.g., Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy), and Caesar’s own works (Commentaries on the Gallic War as well as his Civil War). We will place this ancient evidence in the context of work by modern scholars who rely on this same evidence in their own investigations of Caesar’s successes and failures. With the assistance of the instructor, students will also ask their own questions, and then work on answering their questions in light of their own close reading of the sources and in conversation with previous modern scholarship on related topics. Students may choose their research topics from Caesar’s political, military, personal, or religious career.

In this seminar we will explore the various ways in which human beings in the western world, from the Renaissance to the present day, have answered the question "Where did we come from?" Beginning with early-modern challenges to the biblical story of Adam & Eve, we will work through the rise of evolutionary theory in the 19th Century and the science of paleoanthropology in the 20th, and finish with a look at how 21st Century scientists are studying and portraying our collective origins. Using a combination of primary and secondary readings, we will pay special attention to how different accounts of human origins relate to the wider circumstances - political, religious, technical and others - in which their authors live and work.

From organic food at the White House to oil drilling in Alaska, from Everglades restoration to carbon trading, from New Orleans reconstruction to the war in Iraq, the environment is at the center of many current political issues. All these cases raise important questions about who can speak for nature, and who benefits and who suffers from "saving the environment." In this course, we will examine how some people disproportionately experience exposure to environmental hazards, while others disproportionately gain unrestricted access to natural resources. We will focus on how environmental issues intersect with race, gender, class and other differences, and how people respond to these intersections. While investigating historical and contemporary environmental conflicts and environmental justice campaigns, students will be asked to think critically about what "nature" means in a wide variety of contexts in the United States and abroad. Each student will write a research paper that analyzes a current environmental justice campaign using textual and visual evidence to support an incisive and innovative argument.

How does living in a city affect our psychological state and self-image? Is there such a thing as "the spirit" of a city? If so, what determines it? How do people identify with their city's history and how does this influence their understanding of who they are? These and other questions will be explored in this SRS, in which students will take a step-by-step approach toward constructing a research topic on a particular city. Students will choose cities they see as embodying a particular ethos. They will then probe deeper into the history of these cities to find what contributes to their reputation. Looking at such works as The City by Max Weber, as well as writings by Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Oswald Spengler, J. R. Mellor, and others (as well as online articles and video lectures), students will examine how their cities compare with the expectations, advantages, and problems traditionally associated with urban life. Next, using St. Petersburg, Russia, as a model, we will transition to literature to see how the "myth" of a city is created. Reading short works by Pushkin and Gogol, we will look at how a city's purpose (as an administrative center, industrial hub, center of trade, etc.), past, and social structure affects the lives of its denizens. We will culminate our group reading with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, demonstrating how a particular kind of person emerges from this city.

Three years after the U.S. Census Department announced that a fixed line demarcating the American frontier could no longer be drawn, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." For Turner, the existence of the frontier had defined the rugged independence of the American individual, i.e., self-reliant, optimistic, adaptable, and ingenious. Furthermore, he warned that with the loss of the frontier the nation required a new means of defining American character.

Concurrent with this development, the last decades of the 19th century witnessed an explosion of interest in sports. Long distained, especially by those who held Victorian values, athletic activity and sports developed during this period into an important institution with a vital social purpose in American life. In particular urban, middle-class men and women envisioned sport as an activity that taught the values fundamental to American identity, the values of a frontier society, the values of the rugged individual, of free enterprise, of community, of adaptability, of creativity, and of success. The intertwining of sport and American identity (whether by class, gender, ethnicity, or race) only deepened during the whole of the 20th century.

The linkage of sport to the development of the distinctive traits often associated with American identity can be researched from a variety of perspectives. In addition to the expansion and acceptance of particular sports (perhaps especially professional baseball and college football) as well as the lives of late 19th and 20th century sports heroes and personalities, social reformers, business executives, and political leaders embraced and popularized this relationship.

The goal of this course is to learn how to think critically about personal finance. This consists of learning how to ask questions, how to find and evaluate evidence, how to form a hypothesis, make an argument, and present your findings in a written and oral forms. We will examine choices households make with respect to spending, borrowing and saving. We will examine how psychological biases influence these decisions and how private and public sector can help in achieving better outcomes.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast and devastated the city of New Orleans. For weeks after, the popular media framed the almost total failure of institutions to adequately prepare for and respond to the disaster and raised stark questions about the role of race and class. New Orleans' history of social problems was painted in ugly terms. Katrina was a social as well as a natural disaster.

Since then, social scientists have been studying the many issues raised by these events. In this seminar, we will attempt to 'unpack' the Katrina disaster by examining this research and by doing some of our own. We will use content analysis techniques to examine television representations of the disaster, documenting their key themes. Then we will explore what social science has learned about the adequacy of media images of disaster. How do sociologists define disaster? How does TV news work and what role does it play in disasters? How do our popular myths about disaster compare to reality? How do the existing social structures of race, class and gender in a community make its members more or less vulnerable to disaster? How do communities go about recovering from disaster? How did these issues play out in New Orleans before, during and after Katrina? Each student will research and write a paper on a specific sociological issue concerning the hurricane.

The 1979-80 Iran hostage crisis, in which Iranian university students held U.S. citizens in captivity for 444 days inside the American embassy in Tehran, has left an indelible mark on U.S.-Iranian relations. In this course we will study the economic, political, cultural, historical, and other factors that have shaped today's Iran. We will take, as our point of departure, one of the most important events in modern Iranian history: The CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953. We will study this event, and the subsequent 25 years of repression and de-democratization, in the context of Iran's anti-colonial struggles and modernization efforts of the previous 150 years or so. This approach will illuminate the genesis of the 1979 revolution, the hostage crisis, the evolution of the Islamic Republic since then, and the many aspects of the current multifaceted relationship between Iran and the rest of the world.

The goal is to enable students to contextualize, and thus better understand, current issues such as the role of petroleum and nuclear energy in Iran's political economy and in its relationship with the rest of the world, the role of Islam in Iran, the position of women in society, the emergence of the "Green Movement," and related issues. In this journey, students will develop an appreciation of Iran as a complex, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, modern, vibrant society with an ancient history and a rich cultural heritage.

In this seminar, we will study the life and career of Julius Caesar, a general who conquered Gaul, a politician who dominated the state, and a religious reformer who, even before his famous assassination on the Ides of March in 44 B.C., was worshipped in some places as a god on Earth. How do we separate facts from legend and fiction in such an extraordinary career? We shall begin with a close reading of ancient sources, including biographies (e.g., The Divine Julius by Suetonius), letters and speeches (Cicero), historical accounts (e.g., Sallust's Catilinarian Conspiracy), and Caesar's own works (Commentaries on the Gallic War as well as his Civil War). We will place this ancient evidence in the context of work by modern scholars who rely on this same evidence in their own investigations of Caesar's successes and failures. With the assistance of the instructor, students will also ask their own questions, and then work on answering their questions in light of their own close reading of the sources and in conversation with previous modern scholarship on related topics. Students may choose their research topics from Caesar's political, military, personal, or religious career.

This seminar will examine the phenomenon of witch hunting in Early Modern Europe through a detailed study of several Scottish Witch Trials between 1590 and 1660. Scotland had no medieval witch trials. Only after the Reformation, when witchcraft became a secular as well as religious crime, did the trials begin. Course readings will include a general history of early modern witchcraft, two early treatises on witch hunting (the infamous Hammer of Witches [1486] and James VI's Demonology), a collection of original documents concerning the so-called North Berwick Witches (1590-93), and trial records from several seventeenth-century cases. Using these resources, the course will reconstruct the political, social, economic, intellectual, religious, and gender context of the witch trials with the goal of understanding why people were willing to burn their neighbors for crimes they not only did not commit, but could not have committed.

From organic food at the White House to oil drilling in Alaska, from Everglades restoration to carbon trading, from New Orleans reconstruction to the war in Iraq, the environment is at the center of many current political issues. All these cases raise important questions about who can speak for nature, and who benefits and who suffers from "saving the environment." In this course, we will examine how some people disproportionately experience exposure to environmental hazards, while others disproportionately gain unrestricted access to natural resources. We will focus on how environmental issues intersect with race, gender, class and other differences, and how people respond to these intersections. While investigating historical and contemporary environmental conflicts and environmental justice campaigns, students will be asked to think critically about what "nature" means in a wide variety of contexts in the United States and abroad. Each student will write a research paper that analyzes a current environmental justice campaign using textual and visual evidence to support an incisive and innovative argument.

Sophomores looking ahead to study abroad in their junior or senior year tend to anticipate a pleasant experience. They do not think about potential pitfalls or problems they may encounter in the transition to a new culture. This course will examine the types of study abroad available to Union students and the problems associated with them. Two major areas to be covered will be the intercultural adjustment U curve and the millennial generation and the problems it can pose for study abroad. Other subjects will be treated once I determine the interests of the group.

This seminar will focus on the National Socialist (NS) movement in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. Topics will include: the rise of the NS movement during the Weimar Republic; the establishment of a dictatorship; the NS goal of a "People's Community", the NS policies of "racial hygiene" and autarky (national self-sufficiency) and their consequences; military expansion and war; genocide; and the postwar "denazification" of Germans. Reading will include primary sources -- letters, speeches, reports, film and images from the NS period -- and selections from secondary accounts--articles and books written by historians. Students will both interpret the primary sources for themselves, and compare and contrast how various historians have written the history of NS.