This interdisciplinary course surveys modern European culture to disclose the alignment of literature, opposition, and revolution. Reaching back to the foundational representations of anarchism in nineteenth-century Europe (Kleist, Conrad) the curriculum extends through the literary and media representations of militant organizations in the 1970s and 80s (Italy's Red Brigade, Germany's Red Army Faction, and the Real Irish Republican Army). In the middle of the term students will have the opportunity to hear a lecture by Margarethe von Trotta, one of the most important filmmakers who has worked on terrorism. The course concludes with a critical examination of the ways that certain segments of European popular media have returned to the "radical chic" that many perceive to have exhausted itself more than two decades ago.

This course introduces the history of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic World from 1776 to 1848. Running alongside and extending beyond these political revolutions is the First Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic World, dominated by European empires in 1776, was transformed through revolution into a series of independent states by 1848, experiencing profound changes through the development and consolidation of capitalism. Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to: think analytically about the history of the revolutionary age between 1776 and 1848; define what a “revolution” means as well as describe what made 1776-1848 an “age of revolution”; define the concept of the Atlantic World and describe its importance in World History; explain the basic intellectual and technical movements associated with the Enlightenment and their relations to the revolutionary movements that follow; identify and describe the causes of the American Revolution; identify and describe the many stages of the French Revolution: the end of absolutist monarchy, the implementation of constitutional monarchy, and the rise of the Jacobin Republic; compare and contrast the Declaration of the Rights of Man and other major statements of the Revolutionary period and Enlightenment thinking; identify and describe the impact of the first successful slave rebellion in world history—the Haitian Revolution; compare and contrast the debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine; analyze and interpret primary source documents that elucidate the causes and effects of the Age of Revolutions. This free course may be completed online at any time. (History 303)

The constitution of the United States was composed in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Afterward, ratifying conventions were held in the states. In Massachusetts, site of the previous year's Shay's Rebellion against government enforcement of private debt collection, ratification did not go uncontested. Farmers from the western part of the state, such as the "yeomen" who signed this letter published in the Massachusetts Gazette in January, 1788, were suspicious of the power that the constitution seemed to centralize in elite hands. Rural smallholders were not the only ones who felt this way, however. Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris as the United States' minister to France, felt similarly. Massachusetts ratified the constitution on February 7, 1788.

General George Washington and the patriot leaders faced an enormous challenge in mounting a military campaign against the British forces during the revolutionary war. For soldiers, they drew upon existing state militias and also raised a Continental army. But no such source for a naval force existed. Instead, Washington's officers acquired the services of American captains and sailors by commissioning them as privateers, or private citizens authorized to attack a military enemy. Colonists had long experience serving as privateers for the British forces during numerous eighteenth-century wars against Spain, France, and the Netherlands. They now turned their skills against Great Britain. Andrew Sherburne's memoirs capture the youth's enthusiastic desire to participate in the military campaign against the British; many others were less enthusiastic about their military service due to its infrequent pay and poor living conditions.

Because most early-eighteenth century European colonization occurred in coastal areas, Native Americans living in interior regions maintained greater control over their lands and culture. In the lower Mississippi Valley (as in the Great Lakes region), the contest between European imperial rivals for control of North America strengthened the natives' hand. No group--European or Indian--held sovereign power, and diplomatic, military, trading, and social exchanges continued for much of the eighteenth century. But the treaties that concluded the Seven Year's War and ended French colonization of North America changed that situation. The lower Mississippi valley was partitioned between the British colony of West Florida and the Spanish colony of Louisiana. Native occupants perceived the dramatic consequences as Alibamon Mingo, elderly leader of the Choctaw nation, indicated in his meetings with the British in Mobile in 1765. Mingo remembered the French fondly and spoke of his expectations of fair trade and just treatment from the British.

Wealthy planters from the Caribbean island of Barbados settled in Carolina in the late seventeenth century and turned Carolina's farms into large plantations that concentrated on growing rice. This transformation was enabled by the many enslaved Africans in the colonies who had grown rice as free men and women in West Africa; scholars have traced the origins of Carolina and Georgia's rice culture back to those African rice fields. In this letter, Johann Martin Bolzius described rice cultivation's highly skilled but backbreaking labor, and the colonies' task system of work. Each slave was assigned a particular duty and, after completing the day's tasks, might have some time to him or herself. Bolzius had left Halle, Germany, in 1733 on route to the new colony of Georgia where he lived upriver from Savannah. He wrote this letter in the form of a questionnaire, providing a vivid description of agriculture and life in the new colony.

During the late-18th century, many southerners headed west, leaving older areas such as the Carolinas and Georgia; by 1790 more than 100,000 had moved into Kentucky and Tennessee. David Crockett was born in 1786 in East Tennessee. He fashioned a career as an Indian fighter, politician, and frontier humorist, using his mastery of the vernacular to spin tales on the campaign stump or in print. Crockett had many supposed life stories, but A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, published in 1834, is believed to be Crockett's actual work (edited by Thomas Chilton). These excerpts about bear hunting in Tennessee emphasized Crockett's reputation as a great hunter and contributed to his legendary status even before his death at the Alamo in 1836.

With ongoing protests against the Townshend Duties, waterfront jobs scarce due to nonimportation, and poorly-paid, off-duty British troops competing for jobs, clashes between American laborers and British troops became frequent after 1768. In Boston, tensions mounted rapidly in 1770 until a confrontation left five Boston workers dead when panicky troops fired into a crowd. This print issued by Paul Revere three weeks after the incident and widely reproduced depicted his version of what was quickly dubbed the Boston Massacre." Showing the incident as a deliberate act of murder by the British army

During the 18th century, American colonists found themselves increasingly involved in wars, often imperial ones, spiraling out of European battlefields onto the North American continent. The Seven Years War between France and Great Britain began along the western frontier and spread in 1754. New Englanders eagerly volunteered for expeditions leading to the invasion of French Canada. British and colonial forces succeeded together in capturing the great French fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia in 1758. But as Massachusetts soldier Gibson Clough discovered, the British regular army looked down on the colonial militia. British concepts of discipline and social hierarchy varied significantly from colonial ones, and the war experience began to encourage colonists' conception of themselves as Americans.

The Boston Massacre became an important symbol for radicals who used the incident to build popular opposition to British rule. For thirteen years after the incident, Boston observed March 5, the anniversary of the incident, as a day of public mourning. Artists continued to redraw, repaint, and reinterpret the Boston Massacre long after it occurred. This engraving based on a painting by Alonzo Chappel was published in 1868. While the artist still omitted Crispus Attucks, a black sailor who was one of those killed in the Massacre, it showed the chaos of the confrontation and captured the horror of soldiers shooting down unarmed citizens.

A 1774 British print depicted the tarring and feathering of Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm. Tarring and feathering was a ritual of humiliation and public warning that stopped just short of serious injury. Victims included British officials such as Malcolm and American merchants who violated non-importation by importing British goods. Other forms of public humiliation included daubing victims' homes with the contents of cesspits, or actual violence against property, such as the burning of stately homes and carriages. This anti-Patriot print showed Customs Commissioner Malcolm being attacked under the Liberty Tree by several Patriots, including a leather-aproned artisan, while the Boston Tea Party occurred in the background. In fact, the Tea Party had taken place four weeks earlier.

features one of the oldest surviving textile mill complexes in the U.S. Learn how technology revolutionized the textile-manufacturing industry, and, in turn, affected mill architecture, city planning, and transportation.

In the decades after the American Revolution, improvements in transportation facilitated the growth of internal commerce in the United States. State and local governments planned turnpikes, roads, and canals, and New York State built the grandest one of the era: the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal was constructed at public expense by thousands of laborers between 1817 and 1825. The canal stretched 364 miles from Albany to Buffalo and linked the new nation's heartlands in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley with New York City and the Atlantic coastal trade. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his travels along the waterway in this 1835 sketch, noting the traffic in goods and people along with the rise in commercial activity along its path. The canal and other improvements, however, also threatened farmers 'abilities to withstand the market's fluctuations and maintain local sufficiency.

This 1767 engraving, published in Great Britain and attributed to Benjamin Franklin, warned of the consequences of alienating the colonies through enforcement of the Stamp Act. The act was a 1765 attempt by Parliament to increase revenue from the colonies to pay for troops and colonial administration, and it required colonists to purchase stamps for many documents and printed items, such as land titles, contracts, playing cards, books, newspapers, and advertisements. Because it affected almost everyone, the act provoked widespread hostility. The cartoon depicts Britannia, surrounded by her amputated limbs marked Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England as she contemplates the decline of her empire. Franklin, who was in England representing the colonists' claims, arranged to have the image printed on cards that he distributed to members of Parliament.

" Explore the future through modeling, reading, and discussion in an open-ended seminar! Our fields of interest will include changes in science and technology, culture and lifestyles, and dominant paradigms and societies."

Traditional craft production centered around an independent master artisan, his journeymen, and the apprentice helpers who worked together in small shops. Apprentices worked alongside masters and received training in the "mysteries of the craft" in exchange for their labor. Journeymen looked forward to becoming proprietors when they accumulated sufficient capital and skill. In his Sketches of Lynn (1880), David Johnson recalled the masculine work culture and small-scale setting of the shoe industry in early-19th century Lynn, Massachusetts. With transportation improvements and growing commercial activity, manufacturing moved from small shops engaged in custom work to larger-scale production of ready-made goods. No area experienced greater dislocation than Lynn, where shops multiplied, the division of labor increased, and some masters opened larger central shops. Less skilled workers, including women and children, replaced journeymen, apprenticeship declined, and the world that Johnson described faded.

The phrase 'economic development' generally refers not only to economic growth, but to changes in the ways in which goods and services are produced in a country as well as improvements in inhabitants' quality of life. Theories of economic development attempt to explain the social, political, and economic processes that countries go through as they transition from being what are known as 'Less Developed Countries' (LDCs) to being 'Developed Countries' (DCs). In this course, the student will discover how various theories explain development success and failure in the real world. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: Define economic development and its components; Describe major theories of economic development; Understand some simple economic models related to economic development and economic growth, including the Solow Growth model and its extensions; Place economic development theories in the social and political context in which they were created; Critically examine economic development theories in light of a history of poor performance in development programs. (Economics 304)

From the Evolution Web site, explore the rise of a revolutionary idea and the controversies that surround it.

This unit provides basic historical background to the French Revolution. It will show that the Revolution accelerated intellectual, cultural and psychological change, and opened up new horizons and possibilities. In fact, while much controversy and scepticism remain as to the real extent of underlying change in the social and economic structure of France, it is generally agreed by scholars that the Revolution stimulated a widening of expectations and imaginative awareness: a belief, inherited from the Enlightenment, in the possibility of progress, as well as a conviction that state and society could be reconstituted with a view to realizing social and individual aspirations and human happiness generally. As it degenerated into violence and bloodshed, however, the Revolution also provoked scepticism and pessimism about progress and human nature. The two basic types of modern political outlook, progressive and conservative, date from this experience. Which, if any, of these sets of beliefs was true is not at issue here. What matters is that the Revolution gave rise to them and gave them lasting life