This subject is devoted to reading and discussing basic American historical texts that are often cited but often remain unread, understanding their meaning, and assessing their continuing significance in American culture. Since it is a “Communications Intensive” subject, 21H.105 is also dedicated to improving students’ capacities to write and speak well. It requires a substantial amount of writing, participation in discussions, and individual presentations to the class.

This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the “good life” through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.

This course explores the experiences and understandings of class among Americans positioned at different points along the U.S. social spectrum. It considers a variety of classic frameworks for analyzing social class and uses memoirs, novels, and ethnographies to gain a sense of how class is experienced in daily life and how it intersects with other forms of social difference such as race and gender.

This course provides an overview of electoral politics in the United States, covering presidential, congressional, state, and local elections. It covers the development of American elections over time, electoral rules and institutions, the macro-structural forces shaping electoral outcomes, the key organizations involved in elections (parties, etc.), candidates’ calculations and campaign strategies, and the role of ordinary citizens in the electoral process, as well as potential reforms to the U.S. electoral system.

This course explores the reasons for America’s past wars and interventions. It covers the consequences of American policies, and evaluates these consequences for the U.S. and the world. History covered includes World Wars I and II, the Korean and Indochina wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis and current conflicts, including those in in Iraq and Afghanistan, and against Al Qaeda.

This course examines the causes and consequences of American foreign policy since 1898. Course readings cover both substantive and methods topics. Four substantive topics are covered:

major theories of American foreign policy;
major episodes in the history of American foreign policy and historical/interpretive controversies about them;
the evaluation of major past American foreign policies–were their results good or bad? and
current policy controversies, including means of evaluating proposed policies.

Three methods topics are covered:

basic social scientific inference–what are theories? what are good theories? how should theories be framed and tested?
historical investigative methodology, including archival research, and, most importantly,
case study methodology.

Historical episodes covered in the course are used as raw material for case studies, asking “if these episodes were the subject of case studies, how should those studies be performed, and what could be learned from them?”

This course examines the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the United States, from the Civil War to the present. It uses secondary analysis and primary documents, such as court cases, personal accounts, photographs, and films, to examine some of the key issues in the shaping of modern America, including industrialization and urbanization, immigration, the rise of a mass consumer society, the emergence of the US as a global power, and the development of civil rights activism and other major social movements.

This course provides a basic history of American social, economic, and political development from the colonial period through the Civil War. It examines the colonial heritages of Spanish and British America; the American Revolution and its impact; the establishment and growth of the new nation; and the Civil War, its background, character, and impact. Readings include writings of the period by J. Winthrop, T. Paine, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, W. H. Garrison, G. Fitzhugh, H. B. Stowe, and A. Lincoln.

This course studies the national literature of the United States since the early 19th century. It considers a range of texts - including, novels, essays, and poetry - and their efforts to define the notion of American identity. Readings usually include works by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison.

This course explores the metaphorical, historical, social, and psychological value of ghosts in the American novel. Using the theme of “haunting” as a flashpoint for class discussion and a thematic center for our readerly attention, this course examines the American novel in the context of the various histories which might be said to haunt fictional characters in the American novel, to haunt the American novel itself, and ultimately to haunt us: America’s colonial past, its slave past, and other memorable and painful chapters in its past.

This course covers works by major American novelists, beginning with the late 18th century and concluding with a contemporary novelist. The class places major emphasis on reading novels as literary texts, but attention is paid to historical, intellectual, and political contexts as well. The syllabus varies from term to term, but many of the following writers are represented: Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Wharton, James, and Toni Morrison. Previously taught topics include The American Revolution and Makeovers (i.e. adaptations and reinterpretation of novels traditionally considered as American “Classics”). May be repeated for credit with instructor’s permission so long as the content differs.

This course surveys the development of popular music in the United States and in a cross-cultural milieu relative to the history and sociology of the last two hundred years. It examines the ethnic mixture that characterizes modern music, how it reflects many rich traditions and styles, and provides a background for understanding the musical vocabulary of current popular music styles.

This course is concerned primarily with the revolutionary origins of American government. Topics covered include: English and American backgrounds of the Revolution; issues and arguments in the Anglo-American conflict; colonial resistance and the beginnings of republicanism; the Revolutionary War; constitution writing for the states and nation; and effects of the American Revolution. Readings emphasize documents from the period–pamphlets, correspondence, the minutes or resolutions of resistance organizations, constitutional documents and debates.

We will explore the changing political choices and ethical dilemmas of American scientists from the atomic scientists of World War II to biologists in the present wrestling with the questions raised by cloning and other biotechnologies. As well as asking how we would behave if confronted with the same choices, we will try to understand the choices scientists have made by seeing them in their historical and political contexts. Some of the topics covered include: the original development of nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the effects of the Cold War on American science; the space shuttle disasters; debates on the use of nuclear power, wind power, and biofuels; abuse of human subjects in psychological and other experiments; deliberations on genetically modified food, the human genome project, human cloning, embryonic stem cell research; and the ethics of archaeological science in light of controversies over museum collections.

This course is a seminar on the history of institutions and institutional change in American cities from roughly 1850 to the present. Among the institutions to be looked at are political machines, police departments, courts, schools, prisons, public authorities, and universities. The focus of the course is on readings and discussions.

This is a seminar course that explores the history of selected features of the physical environment of urban America. Among the features considered are parks, cemeteries, tenements, suburbs, zoos, skyscrapers, department stores, supermarkets, and amusement parks. The course gives students experience in working with primary documentation sources through its selection of readings and class discussions. Students then have the opportunity to apply this experience by researching their own historical questions and writing a term paper.

This course discusses the fundamental material science behind amorphous solids, or non-crystalline materials. It covers formation of amorphous solids; amorphous structures and their electrical and optical properties; and characterization methods and technical applications.

Analysis I covers fundamentals of mathematical analysis: metric spaces, convergence of sequences and series, continuity, differentiability, Riemann integral, sequences and series of functions, uniformity, interchange of limit operations.

This course continues from Analysis I (18.100B), in the direction of manifolds and global analysis. The first half of the course covers multivariable calculus. The rest of the course covers the theory of differential forms in n-dimensional vector spaces and manifolds.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to control system synthesis in which the digital computer plays a major role, reinforced with hands-on laboratory experience. The course covers elements of real-time computer architecture; input-output interfaces and data converters; analysis and synthesis of sampled-data control systems using classical and modern (state-space) methods; analysis of trade-offs in control algorithms for computation speed and quantization effects. Laboratory projects emphasize practical digital servo interfacing and implementation problems with timing, noise, and nonlinear devices.