Surveys Latin American and Caribbean history from the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to the present. We will examine the legacy of Spanish colonialism and slavery, movements for national and cultural independence, twentieth-century radicalism, and the politics of race in contemporary Latin America. Readings include fictional as well as analytical representations, and a film series will accompany the course.

It is often said that books reflect the society in which they were written. Yet many books--and their authors--shaped society, and changed how people understood the world around them. In this course we will focus on a variety of texts from the world of Rome to 1600, the era in which European society took form. In each case, we will seek not only to understand the work itself, but also how it affected the lives and the thought of its readers. Works will range from Cicero and the Biblical New Testament to Luther and Machiavelli.

How and why did Russia become the center of the world's largest empire, a single state encompassing eleven time zones and over a hundred ethnic groups? To answer this question, we will explore the rise of a distinct political culture beginning in medieval Muscovy, its transformation under the impact of a prolonged encounter with European civilization, and the various attempts to re-form Russia from above and below prior to the Revolution of 1917. Main themes include the facade vs. the reality of central authority, the intersection of foreign and domestic issues, the development of a radical intelligentsia, and the tension between empire and nation.

See primary department (STSC) for a complete course description.

The course will consider the creation of a distinctive European civilization from the economic, political, and cultural revolution of the late tenth and eleventh centuries to the beginning of the extension of European power into the non-European world around the turn of the sixteenth century. the course will consider change and continuity on both large and small scales, emphasizing such themes as power and order, the complexities of a pre-industrial economy, the formation of ethnic identities, and the worlds of formal thought and learning as well as those of the imagination and the arts. The course will also consider relations between Europe and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds as well as the role of northern and eastern Europe. A substantial part of the required reading will be original source materials in translation.

See primary department (ANCH) for a complete course description.

See primary department (ANCH) for a complete course description.

See primary department (ANCH) for a complete course description.

See primary department (ANCH) for a complete course description.