History 100

Topics and themes related to the development and impact of Western civilization upon the human community. This subject is analyzed through an intensive examination of a specific historical theme, issue or period. (Credit, full course.)

In this course we will be examining women's participation in a number of social and political movements throughout the world since the late eighteenth century.  The course has two major goals. First, to render visible women's historical participation and contributions to a variety of political and social movements.  And second, to understand how gender (the set of beliefs each culture has regarding male and female difference) has affected women's participation in these movements.  To this end, we will be asking several questions including the following: Is women's participation in social and political movements different from men's, and, if so, how and why?  What types of arguments have women used to justify their involvement in various causes and to what degree do these arguments rest on the experience of women as women (that is, as wives, mothers, caregivers)?  Are these arguments ultimately effective or limiting to women?  Does women's experience as women affect the types of political or social issues they embrace or their methods of achieving change?

Instructor: J. Berebitsky
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This course will focus on the major events of the twentieth century in Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Whenever possible, we will try to examine the relationship between events in one part of the world and other regions.

Instructor: H. Goldberg
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A survey of European civilization from the First World War to the present. Main themes covered in the course are the War and its intellectual aftermath, the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the political collapse of Europe, the Cold War, the European revival and the establishment and growth of the European Union. 

Instructor: A. Knoll

How has the natural world shaped the course of human civilizations? How have human civilizations, in turn, shaped the natural world? And how have these civilizations conceived of their relationship to the natural world? These three questions form the basis of the study of environmental history, and this course will serve as an introduction to this historical methodology. Topics to include disease, agriculture, technological change, geographic determinism, colonial expansion, the industrial revolution and the expansion of capitalism, the chemical revolution, and the emergence of the modern environmental movement.

Instructor: R. Levine

This class will examine the development of a consumer culture from the seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries in Europe and the U. S. “Consumerism” will be used to encompass a whole constellation of changes that occurred during this period, including the shift from a mercantilistic to free market system of capitalistic exchange to the advent of mass production and innovations in methods of retailing and marketing. We will consider how political, social and cultural life in Europe and the U. S. were increasingly organized around seemingly infinite flows and accumulations of commodities, and we will analyze the impact this had on individual behavior and value systems. We will also pay particular attention to the ways in which commodities themselves were transformed from somewhat static status symbols during the Old Regime into the principal means of constituting gendered, class, and personal identities in the modern era.

Instructor: A. Mansker

This reading- and writing-intensive class is designed to engage first-year students in the enterprise of thinking, reading, talking, and writing critically about the past. There are no pre-requisites, and students do not need an intensive or extensive background in the history of the United States or of North America in order to do well in the course. The course explores a number of contentious issues, debates, and problems in the history of North America, organized around the concept of "discovery," a problematic theme that has been so prevalent in hundreds of years of conflict over the meaning of the American nation, landscape, and of the character of the curious people who have inhabited it. The focus on reading and class discussion enables students to work closely with the instructor, to develop ideas about the "meaning" of American history, and to share those ideas with fellow students. In each of the sections of the course we will analyze and evaluate this theme across a broad sweep of time and from diverse perspectives. We will also examine different historical sources: art, fiction, film, maps, music, popular entertainment, travel writing, environmental studies, as well as the works of leading historians. 

Instructor: W. Register
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This course will explore how various acts of civil disobedience have affected the course of world history at different times and in different places, or in some instances it shall explore how an act of civil disobedience reflected the history of the times. It examines, as well, the many ways in which various historical figures: Sophocles' Antigone, Joan of Arc, Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela affected the course of history by challenging laws and practices they believed to be immoral.

Instructor: H. Roberson
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In this course we will examine European and American history from the late-eighteenth century through 2001, focusing on primary texts from a variety of leading figures concerned with issues of faith, human understanding, the character of society, and the role of the individual.

Instructor: J. Willis
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