American experience at home and abroad from Pearl Harbor to the end of the Cold War. Topics include: America's role as global superpower, foreign and domestic anticommunism, social movements of left and right, suburbanization, and popular culture.

Examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the "good life" through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. Explores how such things as department stores, advertising, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics.

This class will study some of the changing ideas within modern physics, ranging from relativity theory and quantum mechanics to solid-state physics, nuclear and elementary particles, and cosmology. These ideas will be situated within shifting institutional, cultural, and political contexts. The overall aim is to understand the changing roles of physics and of physicists over the course of the twentieth century.

This course covers the role of physics and physicists during the 20th century, focusing on Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Feynman. Beyond just covering the scientific developments, institutional, cultural, and political contexts will also be examined.

From pineapples grown in Hawai'i to English-speaking call centers outsourced to India, the legacy of the "Age of Imperialism" appears everywhere in our modern world. This class explores the history of European imperialism in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions from the 1840s through the 1960s.

Interlinked Challenges features bits of information about global challenges from the last 400,000 years. Challenges include: biodiversity, climate change, eco-migrations, economy, energy, food, health, hunger, population growth, poverty, security, sustainability, transportation, urbanization, and water.

Info bits are drawn from articles, podcasts, blogs, press releases, institutional reports, testimonies, encyclopedias, books, and documentaries. Each bit is referenced, date stamped, linked to the original article, tagged on multiple themes, and assigned a related image, which has its own description, author credit, date stamp, image permission, and back link. Connections are made to bits of info from the 2007 IPCC Report on Climate Change.

Essay on the 20th century composer, John Cage

Subject studies important examples of the literary form that, between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century, became an indispensable instrument for representing modern life, in the hands of such writers as Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. The class alternates between eighteenth and nineteenth century topics, and may be repeated for credit with instructor's permission.

Making the History of 1989 materials were developed because teachers and their students have little access to vivid historical documents in English that convey the epochal events of 1989. Project materials utilize recent advances in our understanding of how historical learning takes place, including complex interaction with sources, recursive reading, and skills used by historians.
The site has three key features: a substantial collection of high quality primary sources; a set of multimedia interviews that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources into historical narratives; and lesson plans and document based questions provide historical context, tools, and strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources in ways that make “history making” visible and vivid.

This class is a global survey of the great transformation in history known as the "Industrial Revolution." Topics include origins of mechanized production, the factory system, steam propulsion, electrification, mass communications, mass production and automation. Emphasis on the transfer of technology and its many adaptations around the world. Countries treated include Great Britain, France, Germany, the US, Sweden, Russia, Japan, China, and India. Includes brief reflection papers and a final paper.

This lesson will focus on women in science, specifically as reflected in the Nobel Prize. This activity will be followed by a discussion of the changing role of women in science (and leadership) throughout the century.

Analyzes the impact of trade and financial flows and regional integration on the domestic politics of advanced industrial states. Pressures for harmonization and convergence of domestic institutions and practices and the sources of national resistance to these are examined. Cases include European Union and West European states, US, and Japan. This is a graduate seminar for students who already have some familiarity with issues in political economy and/or European politics. The objective is to examine the ways in which changes in the international economy and the regimes that regulate it interact with domestic politics, policy-making, and the institutional structures of the political economy in industrialized democracies.

A chronological survey of masterpieces of the symphonic literature, ranging from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. Includes one work by each major figure. As a participatory subject, students give oral presentations concerning composers and their symphonies. Prior musical score-reading experience is helpful. Students attend two or three symphonic concerts during the term.

21F.031 examines the terms "avant garde" and "Kulturindustrie" in French and German culture of the early twentieth century. Considering the origins of these concepts in surrealist and dadaist literature, art, and cinema, the course then expands to engage parallel formations across Europe, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Emphasis on the specific historical conditions that enabled these interventions. Guiding questions are these: What was original about the historical avant-garde? What connections between art and revolution did avant-garde writers and artists imagine? What strategies did they deploy to meet their modernist imperatives? To what extent did their projects maintain a critical stance towards the culture industry? Surveying key interventions in the fields of poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and music, the readings also include signal moments in critical thought of the last century. Figures to be considered are: Adorno, Aragon, Bataille, Beckett, Brecht, Breton, Bürger, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Ernst, Jünger, Greenberg, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mayakovsky, and Tzara. Taught in English, but students are encouraged to consult original sources when possible.