FYSM 1405 A, B, C, E – Turning Points in History

Offered by History. Fulfills first-year major requirement for History majors.

Prerequisite(s): normally restricted to students entering the first year of a B.A., B.Cog.Sc., B.G.In.S. or B.CoMS program.
Seminar three hours a week.


FYSM 1405 A – Topic:  The Civil Rights Movement
Hundreds of people converged on the street, marching with placards held high.  They chanted in unison demanding that those standing by hear their voices.  They were met with jeers from the crowd, and ultimately, confronted by a line of police there to keep order.

This could be a scene in the early 20th Century, as suffragettes marched in the streets, demanding the vote for women.  It could also describe the labour movement of the early 20th century, when men and women took to the streets, demanding fair wages, safe working conditions, an end to child labour.  It could describe civil rights activists marching across the bridge in Selma Alabama, where they were brutally assaulted and attacked. It could also describe a contemporary scene in Toronto, New York, or Chicago, where Black Lives Matter activists are demanding an end to state-sponsored violence against black citizens.

This course begins in the early twentieth century when urbanization, industrialization, and massive waves of immigration were transforming American life.  Immigrants, suffragettes, and labour activists all converged in Greenwich Village, New York joining artists and bohemians.  In Greenwich Village, activists and artists – men and women, immigrant and native-born American, black and white — forged new alliances, pushed boundaries, debated and discussed ideas of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and in so doing, redefined what it meant to be an American in the 20th century.

What inspires people to take to the street, to engage in protest, to break laws, in an effort to transform society

In the first half of this course, students will learn about this historical period and then participate in a role-playing simulation in which they must determine what social changes are most important as well as how one can or should realize these goals.

The radical ideas of equality and justice, and the tactics of non-violence and protest – practiced by suffragettes and labour activists – informed and inspired protest movements during the 20th century.

In the second half of the course, we shift to the 1960s, and explore the generation of young people who brought race segregation to an end by defying its laws and conventions. They challenged southern law by sitting at lunch counters, seeking admission to all white public universities and sitting side by side with white students on inter-state buses. They faced mob violence, jail and even death

At each class meeting, students will debate the assigned readings and engage the key historical concepts and methods. Students will submit frequent short essays throughout the year that will progressively develop their analytical skills and writing abilities. Each term, they will submit a longer research essay that will allow them to pursue their own interests in this subject.

This seminar is designed to help students to attain excellent skills in critical reading, research, writing and oral argument. These are the skills fundamental to success in university and are important transferable skills required in many professional careers

FYSM 1405 B – Topic: Victorian London
From Sherlock Holmes to Ripper Street, Dracula to Mr. Selfridge, we continue to be fascinated by nineteenth-century London as the “city of dreadful delight.”  This course will examine the causes and consequences of the city’s modernization between the 1830s and early 1900s as it was shaped by industrialization, fire, cholera and typhus epidemics, the threat of mass rebellion, hunger, migration, population pressure, and crime.  We will look at topics such as smell, sewage, and clean water infrastructure; the East End versus the West End; the rise of department stores and shopping culture; public museums, cemeteries and parks as places of leisure; London as the metropolitan center of a vast empire; gas lighting and electricity; ideas about crime and criminality; the politics of housing and mobility; industrialization and its consequences; photography and the city; sexuality; and animals in the city.  In addition to exploring the history of Victorian London, this course will also be an introduction to the methodologies of historical research, writing, and thinking.

Throughout the course we will build skills that are transferrable across disciplines by practicing how to: use the library’s physical and online resources; closely analyze texts; write effective essays; evaluate and critique others’ work; and present ideas to a larger group.

This is a 1.0 credit full-year seminar that will take place twice a week for 75-minute sessions.  The Fall semester will be devoted to learning about the content of Victorian London’s history through lecture, film and visual sources, readings, and group discussion.  The Winter semester will be about students conducting their own research, rendering creative and academic historical output, presenting their work, and engaging in peer review.  In previous years, we have been lucky enough to have YS Lee, author of a popular young adult series set in Victorian London, come and talk to the class about writing historical fiction.  Hopefully, she can visit the class again and perhaps we can feature more guest speakers.

Readings for this course have not been set but may include selections from:

  • Antoinette Burton, editor, Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain
  • Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
  • M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography
  • Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
  • Y.S. Lee, A Spy in the House
  • Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
  • Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure
  • Bram Stoker, Dracula
  • Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
  • Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

FYSM 1405 C – Topic: Civil War, Compromise and Catastrophy: The 1860s in North America 

The war that began in South Carolina in 1861 shook the still-youthful American republic to its foundations and threatened it with destruction. It also served as a catalyst to the union of the British North American colonies in a different type of political experiment – a federation – which became Canada. Intertwined with the stories of nations were the stories of peoples: Black Americans rising from slavery to freedom and Indigenous peoples facing encroachments on their sovereignty. This course will examine the tumultuous events of the 1860s that transformed the face of the North America and the lives of the peoples who lived there. We will look at how the United States tore itself apart and put itself back together again, and how Canada participated in and reacted to the American conflict. We will also examine how Indigenous peoples across North America dealt with the challenges of the 1860s in war and peace. Topics will include: Confederates in Canada, the impact of the Trent controversy, and the threat of an Anglo-American war; the Sioux and Sand Creek massacres, and the Riel resistance; the Fenian raids and the purchase of Alaska; how John A. Macdonald built a nation and Abraham Lincoln saved another; the difference between emancipation and freedom for the liberated slaves, and the question of race relations in a post-slavery North America. Overall we will examine the 1860s as a North American experience, encompassing both Canada and the United States and all those peoples within that circle.

Through the framework of the tumultuous 1860s we will highlight and develop the skills of critical reading and writing, research, and oral expression through conventional and creative written assignments and role-playing.

FYSM 1405 D – Topic:  Butchery & Betterment: The British Experience, Memory of War Upheaval in the 20th Century

On November 11th 2018 we will mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice. Why, in some participant countries like South African and India, is so little known about the war, whilst the British media’s pursuit of the centenary, over the last four years, has proven almost relentless? The seminar will explore the nature of that coverage of the centenary and also how the First World War has been remembered and commemorated over the course of the last 100 years, using Britain as a case study.  Why do attitudes and meanings given to events change? Do anniversaries hinder or help our understanding of such complex events as war and the diversity of individual experience, in light of such considerations as class or gender, age or loss, region and occupation, rank or branch of the services? In considering British society’s experience of the First World War, is possible for us to speak about ‘the’ war, or rather ‘a’ war? What part have more recent popular programmes like ‘Blackadder’ or ‘Downton Abbey’ or the myriad of films and documentaries about the First World War, played in the shaping of public discourses? How are historians communicating the latest research about the war to the public? What challenges do they face and how are they meeting them? 

FYSM 1405 E – Topic: The Scientific Revolution

In this seminar we shall explore the physics, astronomy, and cosmology of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led to the overthrow of the medieval cosmos and gave rise to the modern universe.