Department of History

Mon, Wed 11:45-12:40
Recitations: Fri 11:45-12:40, Mon 10:40-11:35, Wed 2:20-3:15
The South Asia region – contemporary India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan – has been a crossroads of diverse people, ideas and commodities for millennia.  This course covers key themes and developments in the subcontinent from antiquity to the rise of British colonialism.  We will [...]

Lib W-4540
Tu Th 6:50-8:10
Popular perceptions and representations of Islam and Muslims are often founded on ignorance and outright prejudice.  Fundamental to these understandings are narrow and highly politicized notions of history, frequently accepted uncritically.  Accordingly, this course seeks first to introduce analytical approaches crucial to developing nuanced understandings of historical and contemporary depictions of Islam [...]

SBS N-318
Tu Th 2:20-3:40
Taking oceans, rather than nations or empires, as key units for historical study focuses attention on the movement of people, ideas and commodities across space, and the political and cultural formations that emerge from these circulations. This course will accordingly consider several different stages of [...]

Check out the link to this video, prepared by the American Historical Association’s film-making team, on our graduate program here in the history department:
Preparing Historians for the Challenge of 21st Century Academia
Here are some pictures from the premiere showing of a video featuring our department’s graduate program, at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American [...]

As a research project for my history of industrial hazards class (History 414), students created wikis on the history of some of Long Island’s hazardous waste sites, regulated under the EPA’s Superfund site.  We’ve now converted the results into publicly available websites.  Check it out if you are interested….
Overview
Suffolk County: Farmingdale area, Holbrook area,  Port [...]

Tuesday, December 15, 2009, the Science Times section of the New York Times has published my first ever Letter to the Editor — some decline.

Monday, 14 December 2009, volume 21, issue 1, of the LIHJ went online with six articles, eight reviews, a video interview, the first images of its eMuseum and the “enhanced mission” of writing Long Island history into the larger framework of local, national, and global history.
The Editor in Chief, Charles Backfish, summarized the main content [...]

This course will look at the history of “modern” consumption patterns with particular emphasis on gender identities.  We will look at changing conceptions of “producers” (traditionally represented as  male) and “consumers”(traditionally gendered as female) and explore the ideas (“rational consumption”), practices (shopping), and  institutions (department stores, advertising agencies) that intertwine to create local and national [...]

This course will explore the history of work and environment during the modern era (nineteenth and twentieth centuries).  We will start with readings from “classic” texts and authors that have  set older and newer agendas for the fields of labor history (Marx, Fink, D. Montgomery) and environmental history (Marx, Worster, Cronon), centered, in contrasting ways, [...]

This is one of the theme seminars in the Doctoral program of the Department of History.  It is open to all doctoral students and MA students in the History program.  All others, including MAT students, must have the instructor’s permission to enroll.
The readings will include a mixture of thematic, theoretical and geographically focused texts.  Most [...]