Examine this graph from FRONTLINE/NOVA: What's Up with the Weather? Web site to see dramatic increases in three greenhouse gases over the last two hundred years.

The Printed Ephemera collection at the Library of Congress is a rich repository of Americana. In total, the collection comprises 28,000 primary-source items dating from the seventeenth century to the present and encompasses key events and eras in American history. An American Time Capsule, the online presentation of the Printed Ephemera collection, comprises 17,000 of the 28,000 physical items. More are scheduled to be digitized in the future. While the broadside format represents the bulk of the collection, there are a significant number of leaflets and some pamphlets. Rich in variety, the collection includes proclamations, advertisements, blank forms, programs, election tickets, catalogs, clippings, timetables, and menus. They capture the everyday activities of ordinary people who participated in the events of nation-building and experienced the growth of the nation from the American Revolution through the Industrial Revolution up to present day. A future final release will include thousands of oversize items in the collection.

The images in this topic offer a glimpse of the ways people in cities and towns across California relaxed and entertained themselves during the first half of the 20th century. As new technologies and improved communications brought changes to the work week, people had more free time and new choices about how to spend it.

A survey of world economic history, designed to introduce economics graduate students to the subject matter and methodology of economic history. Topics chosen to show a wide variety of historical experience and illuminate the process of industrialization. Term paper due at the end of IAP. This subject is taught at MIT in an open format. The interactive discussion ranges widely and is designed to help entering graduate students understand the context of the specific papers, read empirical work critically, and make up their minds whether an argument is convincing. The aims of the subject therefore are both to inform students about economic history and to give them a taste of applied economic research.

A survey of how America has become the world's largest consumer of energy. Explores American history from the perspective of energy and its relationship to politics, diplomacy, the economy, science and technology, labor, culture, and the environment. Topics include muscle and water power in early America, coal and the Industrial Revolution, electrification, energy consumption in the home, oil and US foreign policy, automobiles and suburbanization, nuclear power, OPEC and the 70's energy crisis, global warming, and possible paths for the future.

This course offers a broad survey of modern European history, from the end of the Thirty Years' War to the aftermath of World War II. Along with the consideration of major events and figures such as the French Revolution and Napoleon, attention will be paid to the experience of ordinary people in times of upheaval and transition. The period will thus be viewed neither in terms of historical inevitability nor as a procession of great men, but rather through the lens of the complex interrelations between demographic change, political revolution, and cultural development. Textbook accounts will be accompanied by the study of exemplary works of art, literature, and cinema.

The population of Britain grew rapidly during the Georgian period, from around five million people in 1700 to nearly nine million by 1801. It was a time of extreme luxury and extreme poverty, of burgeoning consumer culture and the birth of industrialisation; of spectacular entertainments from exhibitions of giants and exotic animals to public hangings. Explore the newspapers, books, illustrations, posters and political reports of the time to find out more.

This course will introduce the student to the history of Europe from 1800 to present day. The student will learn about the major political, economic, and social changes that took place in Europe during this period including Industrial Revolution, the First and Second World Wars, imperialism, and the Cold War. By the end of this course, the student will understand how nationalism, industrialization, and imperialism fueled the rise of European nation-states in the nineteenth century, as well as how world war and oppressive regimes devastated Europe during the 1900s. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: Think critically and analytically about European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Identify and analyze the varying causes and effects of the Industrial Revolution in Europe; Identify, describe, and analyze the development of a coherent set of ideologies in post-Napoleonic Europe: liberalism, socialism, Marxism, nationalism, and Romanticism; Identify and describe the causes and effects of the era of reform and revolution in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as analyze the Revolutions of 1848; Describe and analyze the effects of urbanizationŃexpanding cities, rising public health risks, redefined social classes, the evolving nature of the family, and new developments in science and thought; Identify the age of nationalism in Europe between 1850 and 1914. Students will analyze FranceŐs Second Empire, ItalyŐs unification, GermanyŐs unification, and the modernization of Russia. Students will also be able to define the emergence of the modern nation-state during this period; Identify the causes and characteristics of EuropeŐs ŇNew ImperialismÓ of the late nineteenth century. Students will also be able to describe and analyze responses to this imperialism in Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Far East; Assess how and why World War I erupted in 1914. Students will also be able to identify and describe the characteristics and impact of the Great War; Identify and describe the Russian Revolution of 1917, including the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the Bolshevik Revolution; Identify and describe the cultural and social problems that characterized post-WWI Europe. Students will be able to analyze Modernism, ethnic and economic problems in central and eastern Europe, and the Great Depression; Identify and describe the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Students will be able to analyze Stalinism, Fascism, and Nazism; Identify and describe the causes and conflicts of World War II. Students will also be able to analyze, identify, and describe the Holocaust; Analyze and explain the Cold War. Students will also be able to analyze, identify, and describe the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union, as well as the end of the Cold War; Identify and describe the post-WWII social transformations in Europe, including the rise of feminism, the rise of counterculture, and new developments in both science and technology; Analyze and interpret primary source documents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using historical research methods. (History 202)

Do the advances in information technology equate to a new industrial revolution? The advances by IBM, Dell and many other manufacturers have resulted in massive changes to our working lives. This unit looks at whether it is possible to predict the future of this industry by comparing it to the development of the automobile industry in the USA.

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 Bront%s, Eliot, Hardy, and Conrad. The class alternates between eighteenth and nineteenth century topics, and may be repeated for credit with instructor's permission.

In the United States, the nineteenth century was a time of tremendous growth and change. The new nation experienced a shift from a farming economy to an industrial one, major westward expansion, displacement of native peoples, rapid advances in technology and transportation, and a civil war. In this lesson, works of art from the nineteenth century are paired with written documents, including literary selections, a letter, and a speech. As budding historians, students can use these primary sources from the nineteenth century to reconstruct the influence of technology, geography, economics, and politics on daily life.
In this lesson students will: Learn about daily life in the United States in the 1800s through visual art and literature; Understand some of the ways in which nineteenth-century life was affected by technology, geography, economics, and politics; Apply critical-thinking skills to consider the various choices artists and writers have made in depicting daily life around them; Make personal connections to the nineteenth century by placing themselves in the contexts of works of art and readings.

This course uses readings and discussions to focus on a series of short-term events that shed light on American politics, culture, and social organization. It emphasizes finding ways to make sense of these complicated, highly traumatic events, and on using them to understand larger processes of change in American history. The class also gives students experience with primary documentation research through a term paper assignment.

This subject introduces the history of science from antiquity to the present. Students consider the impact of philosophy, art, magic, social structure, and folk knowledge on the development of what has come to be called "science" in the Western tradition, including those fields today designated as physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, astronomy and the mind sciences. Topics include concepts of matter, nature, motion, body, heavens, and mind as these have been shaped over the course of history. Students read original works by Aristotle, Vesalius, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, among others.

Intensive study of a range of texts by a single author or by a limited group of authors whose achievements are mutually illuminating. Some attention to narrative theory, and biographical and cultural backgrounds. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication. Topic: Joyce's Ulysses and Its Legacy.

Our linked subjects are (1) the historical process by which the meaning of technology has been constructed, and (2) the concurrent transformation of the environment. To explain the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary public discourse, we will examine responses--chiefly political and literary--to the development of the mechanic arts, and to the linked social, cultural, and ecological transformation of 19th- and 20th-century American society, culture, and landscape.

Today many people assume that technological change is the major factor in historical change and that it tends to lead to historical progress. This class turns these assumptions into a questionŃwhat is the role of technology in history?Ńby focusing on four key historical transitions: the human revolution (the emergence of humans as a history-making species), the Neolithic Revolution (the emergence of agriculture-based civilizations); the great leap in productivity (also known as the industrial revolution), and the great acceleration that has come with the rise of human empire on the planet. These topics are studied through a mix of textbook reading (David Christian's Maps of Time"), supplementary readings (ranging from Auel, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" to Hersey, "Hiroshima"), illustrated lectures, class discussions, guest lectures/discussions, short "problem paper" assignments, and a final project defined by the student. Because MIT is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2011, this version of the class will also focus on connections between MIT as an institution and technology in the history of the last 150 years. "

We will doggedly ask two questions in this class: "What is history?" and "How do you do it in 2010?" In pursuit of the answers, we will survey a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the last several decades. We will examine how these historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytical discussion of their topic, and the advantages and limitations of their approaches.