This course will conduct a comparative study of the grand strategies of the great powers (Britain, France, Germany and Russia) competing for mastery of Europe from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Grand strategy is the collection of political and military means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security. We will examine strategic developments in the years preceding World Wars I and II, and how those developments played themselves out in these wars. The following questions will guide the inquiry: What is grand strategy and what are its critical aspects? What recurring factors have exerted the greatest influence on the strategies of the states selected for study? How may the quality of a grand strategy be judged? What consequences seem to follow from grand strategies of different types? A second theme of the course is methodological. We will pay close attention to how comparative historical case studies are conducted.

In this unit I will be utilizing maps in my classroom to help students comprehend a nonfiction text that explores the development of nineteenth century brain science through the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who is almost killed in an explosives accident. Although relatively brief, the book introduces a number of science-related concepts that can be difficult to grasp. I believe that using maps in the reading will help bridge gaps that students might have in fully understanding the story and its ramifications to nineteenth century brain science.

Maps are perfect for any lesson in any classroom, and if you look hard enough you can find a way to use a map for any lesson you are teaching, in any subject and for any age group. Maps are a perfect classroom tool that can and should be utilized to help students get better understanding of material on their own learning level. They are a natural tool for differentiation. They can be simple or very complex, they can include illustrations, numbers, symbols and signs. They can be colorful or plain. They can be made of an endless number of materials and used to interpret endless subjects and topics. They can be created with a crayon and a piece of paper, or the most powerful satellites mankind has ever known, and everything in between.

This subject examines the experiences of ordinary Chinese people as they lived through the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We look at personal narratives, primary sources, films alongside a textbook to think about how individual and family lives connect with the broader processes of change in modern China. In the readings and discussions, you should focus on how major political events have an impact on the characters' daily lives, and how the decisions they make cause large-scale social transformation.

What has been said of Moby-Dick—that it's the greatest novel no one ever reads—could just as well be said of any number of American "classics" like The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This course reconsiders a small number of nineteenth-century American novels by presenting each in a surprising context.

This seminar looks at two bestselling nineteenth-century American authors whose works made the subject of slavery popular among mainstream readers. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain have subsequently become canonized and reviled, embraced and banned by individuals and groups at both ends of the political and cultural spectrum and everywhere in between.

This course focuses on the period between roughly 1550-1850. American ideas of race had taken on a certain shape by the middle of the nineteenth century, consolidated by legislation, economics, and the institution of chattel slavery. But both race and identity meant very different things three hundred years earlier, both in their dictionary definitions and in their social consequences. How did people constitute their identities in early America, and how did they speak about these identities? Texts will include travel writing, captivity narratives, orations, letters, and poems, by Native American, English, Anglo-American, African, and Afro-American writers.