Undergraduate
100 Level Courses (2024-2025)
Course Nomenclature
- H1-F = "First Term"; the first term of the Fall/Winter Session (September - December)
- H1-S = "Second Term"; the second term of the Fall/Winter Session (January - April)
- Y1-Y = full session (September - April)
- Students should note that courses designated as "...Y1F" or "...Y1S" in the Timetable are particularly demanding.
100-level HIS courses are designed for students entering university. They take a broad sweep of material, and introduce students to the methods and techniques of university study. Each week, students will attend two lectures given by the course professor, and participate in one tutorial led by a teaching assistant. First year courses are not considered to be in an "area" for program requirements. All 100-series HIS courses are mutually exclusive, with the exception of AP, IB, CAPE, or GCE transfer credits. Students may enrol in only one 100-series History course. Students enrolled in more than one of these courses (or who have completed one of these courses or a previous HIS 100-series course with a mark of 50% or greater) will be removed at any time. First-Year students can also enrol in 200-series HIS courses. ALL students enrolled in a History Specialist, Major, or Minor program must take ONE 100-level HIS course.
First-Year Foundation Seminars
First-Year Foundation Seminars are open only to newly-admitted, Faculty of Arts & Science students (3.5 credits or less). They are 1.0 credit or 0.5 credit courses that focus on discussion of issues, questions and controversies surrounding a particular discipline (or several disciplines) in a small-group setting that encourages the development of critical thinking, writing skills, oral presentation and research methods. FYF seminars are as rigorous and demanding as any other first-year course and require in addition the acquisition of those skills expected of successful undergraduate students. With a maximum enrolment of 30 students each, they are an ideal way to have an enjoyable and challenging small-class experience in your first year. Details can be found at the First-Year Opportunities website.
First-Year Foundation Seminars:
- Count as 1.0 or 0.5 of the 20 credits required for an Hon. B.A., Hon B.Sc. or B. Com.
- First-Year Foundation Seminars are not required to get into any Program of Study. However, they may count towards your Program. Please check with your college registrar for further details.
- Can be counted towards the breadth requirement.
Ranging widely chronologically and geographically, this course explores the phenomenon of violence in history. It examines the role and meanings of violence in particular societies (such as ancient Greece and samurai Japan), the ideological foundations and use of violence in the clash of cultures (as in slavery, holy wars, colonization, and genocide), and the effects and memorialization of violence.
Exclusion: HIS100Y1, HIS102Y1, HIS103Y1, HIS106Y1, HIS107Y1, HIS108Y1, HIS109Y1, HIS110Y1
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3), Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
Temporal Requirement: ½ credit
Can we speak of “international relations” before the modern concept of nation-states was established? What forms did globalization take in the pre-modern era? How did early global exchange shape our world today? Students in this course study interactions among peoples, empires, and cultures, in multiple regions of the world (specific areas and time periods will change depending on the professors teaching in any given year). Topics include the impact of new goods and technologies; dissemination of ideas and religions; voyages of migration and exploration; and episodes of conquest and colonization. Analysis of primary sources and intensive focus on becoming strong writers.
Exclusion: HIS100Y1, HIS101Y1, HIS103Y1, HIS106Y1, HIS107Y1, HIS108Y1, HIS109Y1, HIS110Y1, HISA04H3/HISA05H3
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3), Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
Temporal Requirement: 0.5 credit
This course offers an introduction to history as a discipline - to the history of the discipline itself, to the questions, categories, and methodologies that constitute it, to the ways these interrogations and methods have evolved in varied times and places, and to the methodologies students need to acquire to engage in historical inquiry and writing. The course will be part methodological workshop, part epistemological reflection. Designed for any students interested in the study of the past or considering the History major.
Exclusion: HIS100Y1, HIS101Y1, HIS102Y1, HIS103Y1, HIS106Y1, HIS107Y1, HIS109Y1, HIS110Y1
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
Temporal Requirement: 0.5 credit
What role does social media play in the spread of historical falsehoods? Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are relatively new, but the hidden power structures that shape their content are not. This course explores the relationship between social media platforms and history in two ways. First, class discussions, workshops, and guest lectures introduce students to overlooked histories behind social media itself, including the rise of the early internet and its diverse roots and applications. Second, we explore how and why social media platforms, and increasingly AI tools, have come to amplify and automate historical biases and misinformation, while censoring or burying accurate and important historical content. Our course focuses on the big histories behind algorithms to think about the AI future, while offering students hands-on experience building original, critical historical content for social media. Restricted to first-year students.
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
Ever wonder how and why the founding of Islam in 610, the Mongol conquests of Eurasia in the 13th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), or the detonation of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the world? This course ten events changed the world and continue to have ramifications today. Experts will give guest lectures on the important “events,” while students will learn how historians work to understand the significance of these moments, human agency, and the idea of an “event,” itself.
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
First-Year Foundation Courses
This first-year seminar explores radical traditions of education beyond and in resistance to formal schooling. Transnational in scope—and journeying from the late nineteenth century to the present day—we will study the pedagogical innovations and grassroots struggles of anarchic youth, guerrilla intellectuals, and feminist revolutionaries who used education broadly, and historical inquiry in particular, as tools for empowerment and collective liberation. Focusing on primary sources from archives of anticapitalist, antiracist and anticolonial movements, we will investigate traditions of self-teaching and co-learning, genealogies of critical and transformative pedagogies, the construction of decolonial survival and supplementary schools, student mobilizations within and against the university, as well as abolitionist education in our contemporary moment. This course invites participants to interrogate the relationship of education to freedom and justice through collective criticism, self-reflection and creative expression. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary study of history by exploring processes of remembering and forgetting intrinsic to every society. Topics include the ideas of history and memory, memory cultures and narratives and counternarratives and the study of legal trials, museums, monuments, novels and films as popular vehicles of historical knowledge. The course analyzes in particular how the experiences of war and violence have been both remembered and forgotten. The intersection, and dislocation, between trauma and remembrance is a main theme, as is the topic of collective memories in post-conflict societies. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
This seminar explores the roles of religion in extreme violence. Working backward from the 1990s (Rwanda, Yugoslavia), we will consider cases including Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Holocaust, Armenians, German Southwest Africa, and genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will produce a final project based on original research. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)
This course introduces students to the historiographical and theoretical debates in women's and gender history from a global perspective, with emphasis on the local histories of women in the non-western world. Students will study the themes in women's history as articulated by first and second wave feminists. The second part of the class deconstructs the basic assumptions of Western feminism through the perspective of post-colonial feminist writings and empirical studies. The readings are structured so that you consider how examples from Asia disrupt narratives of universality in Western feminist epistemologies. Restricted to first-year students. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.
Breadth Requirements: Society and its Institutions (3)