Name | Tags | Description | Cover Photo | Primary Documents |
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The American Experiment: U.S. History Before 1865 | UndergraduateSurvey | This introductory course surveys the major events, figures, and themes of American history from the first contact between Europeans and Native Americans through the American Civil War and focuses on the various experiments in freedom, rights, and self-government for different groups of Americans. Lectures, readings, and discussions will highlight how European exploration and colonization created new worlds for Native Americans, European settlers, and African slaves in North America; how the American Revolution established a new nation with different meanings for patriots, loyalists, women, blacks, and Native Americans; and how the expansion of U.S. political and economic institutions culminated in secession, civil war, and new freedoms for Americans. | ||
UndergraduateSurvey | This introductory course surveys the major events, figures, and themes of American history from the end of the Civil War to 9/11 and focuses on the changing meanings and experiences of freedom for different groups of Americans. Lectures, readings, and discussions will highlight how new Americans like Native Americans, Freedpeople, and New Immigrants experienced “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War; how the crises of war, depression, segregation, and national security created “new deals” in the 20th century for women, African Americans, and Baby Boomers; and how the rise of conservatism, globalization, and a new world order fashioned a new discourse about freedom for all Americans in the new millennium. | |||
The People’s Game: The History of Soccer and the Modern World | UndergraduateLower Division | Soccer is not only the world’s most popular sport but its most global cultural practice and this course studies the history of international soccer to understand the modern world. The class examines the game’s ancient origins and beginnings as a jumbled folk custom, its formal organization in Great Britain and its spread around the world, and its development as a global entertainment industry through the processes of professionalization, modernization, commercialization, and globalization. Along the way, students will answer two questions: Why is soccer so popular? And how does soccer explain our world? | ||
UndergraduateLower Division | Photographs and videos have become ubiquitous, and this class uses famous photographs as a lens for understanding history – from the first known photograph captured by a camera obscura in the 1820s to recent digital images shot on iPhones. This class teaches the context of famous images and the history behind them, the process and analysis of photography, and the authenticity and role of photographic texts as one of the mediums through which we engage with and understand the past. | |||
UndergraduateUpper DivisionGraduate | This class examines the history of American politics, diplomacy, and war since the end of the Indian Wars in 1890 and teaches three interpretations of U.S. foreign relations: nationalism, revisionism, and realism. Students will use each interpretation to analyze and evaluate U.S. foreign policies and then write a final briefing paper or policy memorandum that will use one interpretation to explain the history of a particular international crisis and advise the President of the United States on how the U.S. should respond. Throughout the course students will also consider important questions about America and the world such as: What drives U.S. foreign policy? Is the United States an empire? and does nationalism, revisionism, or realism best explain U.S. foreign relations? Readings and discussions will focus on major controversies in foreign policy and the themes of national security, democratic liberalism, imperialism, and human rights while the final discussions will ask students to craft and defend a viable foreign policy doctrine for the Biden administration. | |||
UndergraduateUpper DivisionGraduate | Now that the Cold War is ancient history for most students, this course presents a global history of the politics, violence, ideas, and culture of the Cold War from its origins in the Russian Revolution and the end of World War II, to its unexpected end with the 1989 Revolutions and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of its global perspective, the class will look at American history as part of the international Cold War — instead of considering the Cold War as part of American history — and students will study events and figures from Eastern Europe, China, Latin America, and the wider Third World in addition to U.S. foreign policy and relations with the Soviet Union. Students will also engage with fundamental historiographical questions such as: What was the Cold War? When did the Cold War begin and what started it? Why did the Cold War last so long and why did it end? By integrating political, military, intellectual, and cultural history, this class shows post-Cold War generations how the Cold War created the world we live in today. | |||
The Fog of War | UndergraduateUpper Division | Morality and war may sound like an oxymoron, but this class explores the intersections of the two and how statesmen and scholars have engaged with the ethical dilemmas of warfare. Students will read seminal texts like the Mahabharata and writings by Cicero, Augustine, Machiavelli, Voltaire, and Michael Walzer and discuss the principles that provide moral foundations for decision-making in war. Along the way, students will participate in active learning simulations from the siege of Athens to the bombing of Monte Cassino that will help them to think morally about war and to apply the Just War Tradition and the laws of war to contemporary dilemmas. | ||
The Cuban Missile Crisis | Senior SeminarGraduate | This course immerses students in the Cuban Missile Crisis by assigning secondary literature, top-secret documents, memoirs, transcripts, and specific class roles as American, Soviet, and Cuban officials. Students will first read secondary literature to understand the context of U.S.-Cuba relations, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. To discuss the development of the crisis itself, students will assume the roles of American, Soviet, and Cuban officials and examine a collection of primary sources that reveal the play-by-play of events during the famously dramatic thirteen days. Finally, students will read memoirs, histories, and anniversary transcripts to examine the lessons, memories, and legacies of the Cuban Missile Crisis. By participating in this immersive process, students will discover how the foreign policy sausage is made, recognize the contingency of historical events, and understand the political and moral dilemmas of leadership and decision-making. | ||
GraduateUndergraduateUpper Division | Hannah Arendt called World War II and its aftermath “the most profound crisis in Western history since the downfall of the Roman Empire” and this course will examine the war’s moral global history. Each week students will read and write reviews about the latest scholarship on the war and discuss a different moral dilemma with reference to the laws of war and Just War Theory from genocide and counterinsurgency to collaboration, resistance, and nuclear war. |