August 2013

The World Economy

Human beings in all times and places have faced similar economic problems: producing and consuming, buying and selling, working and employing.  In some cases the solutions they arrived at were remarkably alike despite radically different contexts.

War and Society

The historical study of war begins with military history: battles and wars, generals and troops, tactics and strategy. Historians recognize that wars have been waged for many reasons, however, including dynastic ambition, religious sectarianism, and political ideology. To understand how war works, a broad range of methods must be brought into play. By looking at political history, we can see how domestic conflicts and constitutional debates have shaped the ways in which wars were fought, and explore the consequences—territorial, political, institutional—of victory and defeat.

Social Change and Social Movements

Why do large-scale social changes occur when they do? Societies have a particular social order, cultural values and ideologies, institutions, hierarchies, vectors of authority, and economic relations, and then at particular moments, these become susceptible to small or even profound transformations—gradual or abrupt. How have people created the open moments of plasticity that make such transformation possible? What does it mean to band together with others and act collectively to change things?

Science, Technology, and Medicine

How have people sought to know, manipulate, and flourish in the natural world? What kinds of ideas, instruments, and social relationships have they developed in the process? How have these differed across time and place? How does innovation occur? How is it rewarded or regulated? Who gets to count as a reliable source of knowledge? Who is excluded from the benefits of that knowledge? What is an experiment? And are there ones that shouldn’t be performed? These questions are central to the historical study of science, technology, and medicine.

Religion in Context

The study of history has long been connected to the history of religions. For many religions, the very fact of historical study is heretical; for other religions, historical thought is integral to religious practice. We cannot speak about religion without also thinking about its many histories. To start, what is religion? Is it a belief system, a set of cultural values, of ritual practices, and a source of identity? Is it an attempt to explain our place in the cosmos? Or is it all of these things at once? Is its proper role to transcend earthly life or to transform it?

Politics and Law

Many students begin to learn history through stories of the political past: presidents and kings, Congress and parliament, revolutions and wars. History courses at Yale cover all of these subjects in depth, from the imperial rule of Alexander the Great through the presidency of Barack Obama. But they also take a more expansive view of “politics and law,” exploring how a wide range of ideologies, institutional structures, social movements, and political cultures have shaped the global political past.

International History

Although “globalization” became a buzzword during the 1990s, the phenomenon of global interconnectedness is nothing new. From the Silk Road and the Roman Empire to the globalizing technologies and multinational organizations of our own era, history has been shaped by patterns of encounter across the borders of nations and empires. Reflecting Yale’s multifaceted approach to international history, this pathway offers international, transnational, regional, and global perspectives on the past. Courses examine classic questions of international relations, diplomacy, and war and peace.

Ideas and Intellectuals

Ideas shape the world we live in—from why we get married, to what we believe will happen after we die, to why we support a particular political party, to what we believe will make us more prosperous. These ideas have histories. What we believe is not the same as what other people in other places and other times have believed. Why is this the case? Why have some ways of knowing come to dominate in some periods and places, and not in others? Why have certain notions about politics, economics, culture, and the natural world pushed aside competing claims?

Environmental History

The natural environment has shaped all of human history. For millennia, from the first human uses of fire and early agriculture to our new world of power plants, specialized chemicals, and global supply chains, people and nature have been intertwined in myriad complex relationships.  Environmental history is the study of these relationships.