Religious revivals, reasoned discourses, and cultural change characterize America in the 18th century. These phenomena shaped colonial demand for independence. This course explores the issues, events, ideas, and people that changed Englishmen into Americans and English colonies into an independent American Republic.
This course traces the rise of the "American West" in American consciousness from the early 19th century until today. Understanding that American western expansion looks different for the indigenous cultures of the trans-Mississippi West, the course asks students to re-think the "myth of the West" with the reality of western development.
This course will use WWI and Britain’s experience therein as its backdrop. What World War I (known as the Great War in Britain) teaches us is how dramatically the world had changed by the beginning of the twentieth century and how the arrogance of a few would require the ultimate sacrifice of the many. This course looks at the wide-spread social change that the war brought to western society.
Engl 310
This course examines developments in art and visual culture from the middle of the twentieth century to the present through selected discrete topical units. Students will engage critically both visual examples and seminal texts produced by significant art historians, philosophers, art critics and artists. We will read key primary works and also a selection of interpretive studies that address issues of modernism and post-modernism in the United States. Class discussions will be devoted to consideration of this reading and to questions of visual and cultural interpretation.
This course will begin with an in-depth analysis of the French Revolution and conclude by focusing on the First World War. Between these bookends, the course will touch upon those events that contribute to our understanding of the history of Europe during the modern era including discussion of the anti-slavery activism, colonization, political ideologies, the changes brought by the first and second industrial revolutions, the rise of unionism and the suffrage movement. Through lectures, discussion, required reading, film, examination, the use of technology and in-depth assignments, this course will seek to provide an understanding of how these many events transformed modern European society.
Special Topics in History.