Associate Professor of History
James Wald
Associate Professor of History
His teaching and research interests include modern European history with an emphasis on cultural history from the 18th through the 20th centuries; the French Revolution; Central Europe; fascism and Nazism; and early modern Europe.
Particular research interests involve the history of intellectuals and literary life.
Many people have learned and are accustomed to thinking of history as an authoritative account of the past, based on indisputable facts. Scholars of history, by contrast, understand history as a matter of contested and evolving interpretation: debate. And they argue not just over the interpretation of facts, but even over what constitutes a relevant fact. This course will use some representative debates to show how dynamic the historical field is. Topics may include: Did women have a Renaissance? How did people in early modern France understand identity? Why did eighteenth-century French artisans find the torture and slaughter of cats to be hilarious rather than cruel? Were Nazi killers who committed genocide motivated by hatred or peer pressure? Are European Jews descended from medieval Turks rather than biblical Hebrews? Students will come to understand how historians reason and work. In so doing, they themselves will learn to think historically.
It is fashionable today to speak of "sustainability," but how do we understand the term in its broadest sense? Historic preservation plays a key role in researching our history, building civic identity, and creating sustainable communities. Once associated primarily with saving the elegant buildings of the elite, historic preservation today involves vernacular as well as distinguished architecture, landscapes as well as the built environment, and the stories of all social groups. Preservation and adaptive reuse of old buildings play a key role in both economic and environmental policy. Students will study general preservation theory and practice and in particular conduct research on Amherst's history and historic resources. Students will visit local historic sites, document collections, and museums
According to a famous and revealing anecdote, antisemitism means hating the Jews more than necessary. Among the most perplexing things about antisemitism is its persistence. It has flourished for over two millennia in a wide variety of settings, and, despite the rise of modern multiculturalism, seems to be on the rise again. It is no wonder that it has been called the longest hatred. Among the questions we will ask: How does it relate to other forms of prejudice? What are its origins? What forms does it take, and how do they change over time? What are its religious, psychological, or social roots? What were its effects? How did the Jews respond? The course moves from the cultural prejudices of the Classical world, through the anti-Judaic teachings of the Christian churches, to the rise of modern social, political, and racial antisemitism and their new contemporary manifestations, including the Middle East conflict.
For historians, "history" means both historical events and the writing of history. In recent years, they have increasingly turned to the relationship between "history and memory": the way the past shapes the present and the present shapes our views of the past. The twentieth century witnessed the fall of empires and the birth of nation-states, wars of colossal destruction, and the struggle between dictatorship and democracy. How did people recall, interpret, and appropriate this turbulent past: create national identities? confront the contrast between technological progress and moral regression? mourn the millions of war dead? deal with loss of home? seek justice in the wake of Nazism and communism? Ideal for current or prospective history concentrators but open to all.
100 years ago, in 1918, the First World ended and changed the map of Europe. In the past century, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have been transformed from provinces of a multiethnic empire into a series of small successor states whose experience went from independence to Nazi occupation and communist dictatorship and back again. Today, they are members of NATO and the European Union. These three regions, with their dynamic and at times unstable population mixture of Germans, Slavs, Magyars, and Jews, embodied the tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, tolerance and intolerance, the persistence of tradition and the exuberance of modernity-issues also relevant to students studying other topics in the social sciences and humanities. Our course will treat the histories of the countries and cultures and the literature, music, and art that gave voice to those tensions. In addition, we will consider the appropriation of history through memory and memorialization in the present.
Students and teachers spend most of their time reading and writing, but how often do we stop to think about what these acts entail, where they originated, how they have changed? Is the media revolution that we are experiencing one of degree or kind? Will the shift to electronic media mean not just the end of the book, but also the radical transformation of authorship and publishing, indeed, of the very ways that we read, research, and think? In order to situate ourselves in the present, we will turn to history, studying oral culture, the transition from manuscript to print in the Middle Ages, the rise of mass literacy in the modern era, and the rise of new media today. The comparison of past and present will enable students to understand their own situation, in the process introducing them to historical reasoning and research. Class may include occasional local field trips.
As students and teachers, we spend our lives immersed in the world of books, yet we focus mainly on the final product: the "content." We are often told that we are in the midst of a technological and cultural revolution. The "death of the book" (and sometimes, of reading and literature themselves) is proclaimed with increasing frequency. How can we possibly judge such claims? For that matter, just what is a "book"? Are the changes taking place today unique, or have similar upheavals occurred in the past? Ironically, the rise of the computer and digital media has reawakened interest in the history and physicality of written and printed texts. This course, which provides an overview of developments from the medieval through the contemporary eras, brings together the intellectual, the aesthetic, the technological, and the material. As we will see, the book as object and the agents in the circuit of communication--author, publisher, and reader--each have their histories.