HL90 Seminars
What are HL90 Seminars?
HIST-LIT 90 Seminars are discussion-based, writing-intensive, interdisciplinary courses usually capped at 15 students. They are taught by members of our Tutorial Board and Committee on Degrees. First-year students and sophomores interested in History & Literature are encouraged to take HL90 Seminars to get to know the concentration. These courses can be used to satisfy distribution requirements in History & Literature, and students have the option to count one HL90 on any topic for concentration credit regardless of field.
Fall 2020 seminars
HIST-LIT 90DY: Race and American Empire
HIST-LIT 90DB: Museums in America
HIST-LIT 90EC: A Cultural History of the Internet
HIST-LIT 90ED: Music and Resistance in the Modern United States
HIST-LIT 90EE: Fighting the Climate Crisis
HIST-LIT 90EF: White Rage: Progress and Backlash in American History
HIST-LIT 90EG: Human Rights and Ethnic Studies
HIST-LIT 90EH: Asian American Genre Fictions
HIST-LIT 90EL: France and its "Others": Race, Nation, and Identity in (Post)Imperial Society)
HIST-LIT 90EM: Empire and Archive in the Colonial Americas
HIST-LIT 90EN: Latin American Revolutions
HIST-LIT 90EO: The Reinvention of New York City
HIST-LIT 90EP: The Global History of Pests
HIST-LIT 90EQ: Nuclear Imperialisms
HIST-LIT 90ER: Industrialization and Inequality: From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era
This course will explore speeches across the sweep of American history, examining them both as windows into their own era and as texts created to inform and persuade. We will ask who speaks and how and the ways that has evolved over time, and we will seek to identify the enduring and changing elements of effective oratory from Jonathan Edwards to Frederick Douglass to contemporary commencement addresses and campaign speeches. Assignments include the composition and delivery of a speech. 
This course examines the early 20th century expansion of U.S. military influence in the Atlantic and Pacific, and how this expansion shaped and was shaped by theories of race. Beginning with the Spanish-American War (1898), we will follow a series of U.S. interventions in the Atlantic (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela) and Pacific (Guam, Hawaii, Philippines). We will also explore the tensions between imperialism and white supremacy, as theorized by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Special attention will be paid to black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Katherine Dunham, Jessie Fauset, Amy Jacques Garvey, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Eric Walrond, Ida B. Wells)... 
In this seminar, we will consider the literary and cultural history of American museums from the eighteenth century to the present. How have museums prompted broader discussions about taste, expertise, and authority? How can we understand the legacies of historical collecting practices for contemporary institutions? And how have recent debates about decolonization, repatriation, and accessibility informed new ideas about what role museums can play in American culture? Throughout the semester, we will examine a range of sources, from fiction, museum catalogues, and periodicals to paintings, artifacts, and installations; we will also research objects in Harvard’s museum collections and develop a collaborative digital exhibit. 
This course introduces students to the hippies, hobbyists, hackers, cyberspace explorers, and Second Lifers who embraced digital networks as a means to transcend geographic limitations and connect humans in virtual communities online since the late 1960s. We will also examine how corporate and government entities responded to the digital utopian ethos of egalitarianism, communalism, and anarchy. We will explore this history against the backdrop of the late Cold War, the Reagan era, neoliberalism and globalization, Y2K, 9/11, the 2008 global financial crisis, and 2020, and through the lens of race, gender, class, and subculture. Film, music, art, archived websites, memoirs, manifestos, fiction, and non-fiction will shed light on the ways popular culture shaped and was shaped by the... 
While music is often touted as a “universal language” that generates social harmony, it also expresses dissent from and resistance to the status quo. This course asks how music works as a type of social and political resistance, and what aesthetic and formal qualities enable it to do so. We will explore the relationship between music and resistance in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States, in contexts that range from Ma Rainey’s defiant blues songs to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical Hamilton. Focusing especially (but not exclusively) on African American music and musicians, we will consider how music informs modes of resistance tied to race, class, gender, and sexuality. In addition to asking how music can resist extant arrangements of power, we will also consider... 
Humanity currently faces a rapidly worsening environmental situation in light of the global climate crisis: rising seas and ocean acidification, deforestation and ecosystem collapse, and species extinction at alarming rates. Behind these worrying developments, however, lies a human history of imperialism, industrialization, and globalization that remains inextricable from the so-called natural world. Recent efforts in climate justice, such as Extinction Rebellion and the Green New Deal, have sought to counter this history by imagining new visions for sustainable societies. In this course, students will explore the ways that storytelling and history intersect with the discourse on the global climate crisis, as well as the social responsibilities of artists, businesses, and citizens in effecting climate... 
The course examines how people struggled to achieve the full-promise of freedom throughout American history. The organizing theme of the course is the cycle of progress and retrenchment, of revolutions and counter-revolutions, that has come to define American life. The course begins with enslaved people’s struggles for freedom and the white planters who created a form of representative government to maintain the institution. From there, we proceed chronologically through American history to the present, exploring changing notions of community, strategies used to gain freedom, and the range of violent responses that groups seeking liberation encountered. Our readings will include a play by Suzan Lori-Parks, manifestos by white power advocates, George Schulyer’s novel... 
Human rights is often considered a bulwark against authoritarianism and fascism, our “last utopia," but others have critiqued human rights as either a new form of imperialism or as an imposition of western values on the rest of the world. These debates demonstrate that human rights is both a powerful way of calling attention to matters of injustice as well as an idea that is itself the subject of critique. How did this come to be? In this class, we will track the increased attention on human rights in the latter half of the 20th century. Together we will explore how organizers, writers, and intellectuals in the tradition of what we broadly call Ethnic Studies have engaged the dilemmas of human rights while trying to work towards a more just world. We will cover how human rights became an important... 
There was an explosion of works by Asian American authors on the American publishing scene near the turn of the millennium, an unexpected consequence of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which brought an influx of immigrants from Asia and dramatically altered the demographic composition of the U.S. The descendants of these post-1965 immigrants comprise a diverse group of Asian American authors, and in this course, we study the many different genres and forms of contemporary Asian American fiction. Asian American literature is often associated with certain themes (inter-generational conflict in families, fraught nature of immigrant identity, etc.), but this course instead emphasizes the formal qualities of contemporary Asian American writing alongside their domestic... 
How do we know the histories of colonialism and empire? In this course, we will study how European expansion in the Americas fueled and was fueled by the production of records and representations of colonial spaces and their peoples. We will study how violence and resistance shaped alternative systems of knowledge making among Indigenous and African communities, including oral histories, wampum, featherwork, graffiti, and vodou. We will work with sources by canonical authors including Columbus, Montaigne, Mary Rowlandson, and Juana Inés de la Cruz alongside the works of anonymous or unfamiliar writers, artists, and craftspeople including Afro-Brazilian healers, Tupinambá featherworkers, and the Massachusett and Nipmuc printers who worked in Harvard Yard. Throughout... 
This course explores the origins, trajectory, and outcomes of three twentieth century Latin American revolutions: Mexican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan. Students will analyze what these three revolutions shared in common, such as the causes, which included discrimination, US imperialism, state violence, economic inequity, and political marginalization, but also consider the nuances of what made them different, and in which ways the later revolutions were inspired by the previous ones. The class will rely on primary sources, such as novels, film, photographs, music, murals, and manifestos to explore how all sectors of society helped foment changes to the physical, economic, and social landscapes in these countries. Students will investigate community grassroots mobilization tactics... 
Pests have had impacts large and small on human life, serving as sources of lethal pandemics and minor annoyance alike. But what constitutes a pest has varied greatly over time and space. This course examines these themes with a focus on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, an era of optimism for pest eradication and visions of environmental control more broadly. It subsequently turns to the consequences of these efforts--both life-saving and deleterious--to the present. Throughout, the course contextualizes pests as products of sedentary agriculture, empire, and capitalism. Topics include mosquitoes and revolution in Haiti, street dogs and health in Istanbul, and rats and race in Baltimore. The course also touches on the broader cultural resonance of pests, by attending... 
This course will examine nuclear narratives in global contexts as reminders and remainders of empire. Are nuclear futures only tied to whims of unpredictable world leaders, or are they already part of our daily realities? Whose stories of nuclear proliferation are told, and whose are suppressed? Drawing on government propaganda, activist writing, television, fiction, photography, poetry, and film from 1945 to the present, this course will explore the cultural and material legacies of radiation around the world. From American “atomic culture” of the 1940s and ‘50s to Cold War era peace movements in the Pacific Islands to nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, we will assess whether nuclear cultures have changed over time by using a place-based investigation of nuclear... 
Industrialization after the Civil War transformed American life in dramatic and horrifying ways, and it transformed “literature” as a category of cultural consumption too. Some writers, like the muckrakers, believed that their work had the capacity to shape public life. Others like Henry James conceived of their writing as art that operated according to its own rules. Still others like Ambrose Bierce grew pessimistic about literature’s capacity to accomplish anything whatsoever. This course will examine American literature at the turn of the twentieth century, when robber barons enriched themselves and many Americans were plunged into deep poverty. Through readings like Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, and Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio,... Spring 2021 seminars
HIST-LIT 90AN: God Save the Queen! Ruling Women from Rome to the Renaissance
HIST-LIT 90DV: Red Scares
HIST-LIT 90DZ: Too Soon? Comedy in Europe’s Tragic Twentieth Century
HIST-LIT 90EI: Islam in Early America
HIST-LIT 90EJ: Espionage: A Cultural History
HIST-LIT 90EK: American Noir
HIST-LIT 90ES: Prison Abolition
This seminar will explore female rulership in Europe from the late Roman empire to the age of Elizabeth I. Discussion of varied texts and images (most of them primary sources in translation) will reveal the role of queens within their societies, their relationship to broader social and cultural institutions such as the Christian Church, and the ways in which queens were celebrated, criticized, and imagined by writers and artists of their time. 
When, in his 2019 State of the Union address, President Trump said, “We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” he invoked American rhetoric that reaches back to the European revolutions of 1848. The first so-called Red Scare, precipitated by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, produced the Espionage Act, which was recently used to charge former CIA analyst Edward Snowden in the leak of classified documents related to the NSA’s surveillance program. In the second Red Scare that followed World War II, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Senator Joseph McCarthy, the FBI, and others conducted widespread investigations of suspected communists and purged “subversives” from... 
In the first half the twentieth century, Europe was the site of two wars that depleted the world’s population, dislocated millions, and stripped once diverse regions of the continent of their minority populations. Even as Europe started to rebuild itself in the 1950s, progress occurred under the shadow of two hegemonic superpowers in possession of weapons capable of incinerating not just both sides of the Iron Curtain but the entire planet.
Muslims first arrived on the shores of the Americas at the turn of the sixteenth century, yet their long history in the western hemisphere has been largely forgotten. For centuries Islam was the second-most widely practiced monotheistic religion in the Americas, after Catholicism; some Muslims came from Spain to escape persecution at the hands of the Inquisition for continuing to practice their religion, while others were taken captive and forcibly crammed into the hulls of ships on the West African coast and transported across the Atlantic, where, in 1522, they participated in the first uprising of enslaved men and women in the Americas on a sugar plantation on the island of Hispaniola (the site of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). From the very beginning of European... 
Over the course of the twentieth century the spy thriller became a central part of our culture, changing the way people imagined how the state operates in secret. Why are we attracted to stories of paranoia and conspiracy? What is the history of this genre, and how is it intertwined with the history of espionage? This course will consider the historical origins of spying, exploring how the modern intelligence agencies had their origins in the project of empire. The bulk of the course will be divided into three units. The first will consider the British spy panic of the early twentieth century, in which a wave of pseudo-realistic espionage fiction, including from Erskine Childers, Baroness Orczy and William le Queux, contributed to an atmosphere of panic and paranoia about Germany... 
Midcentury America saw the explosion of a genre on the page and screen—the hardboiled crime novel and the film noir. Noir represented a foil to postwar optimism: its protagonists were cynics and loners. Filled with lurid crimes and deeds, noir suggested a dark underbelly to American society and its promises of domestic fulfillment, economic stability, and institutional support. Husbands and wives plotted each other’s murders; the city streets beckoned with sin; and the police were no match for the private detective. Yet even while these stories foregrounded alienation, they also had a mass cultural appeal to American audiences. We will examine noir not only as an aesthetic—brutality stylishly dressed up in beauty—but also as a political commentary on disillusionment... 
Is prison abolition a serious proposal, an aspirational ideal, a trendy slogan, or a blueprint for social transformation? This interdisciplinary and community-engaged course situates the prison abolition movement in deep historical context and explores its current relation to the politics of criminal justice reform. We will study the movement’s connections to slavery abolitionism, anti-lynching activism, Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, and the Black Power movement. We will examine the emergence of the modern prison abolitionist movement in the 1970s, as well as more recent developments concerning immigration detention, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19. Our readings will include interdisciplinary scholarship on the carceral state in addition to protest...