Roman Literature of the Golden Age of Augustus Caesar, produced during the transition from Republican to Imperial forms of government, was to have a profound and defining influence on Western European and American societies. These writings ultimately established lasting models of aesthetic refinement, philosophical aspiration, and political ambition that continue to shape modern cultures. This class will be exploring the Golden Age of Latin Literature from an historical perspective in order to provide an intensive examination of the cultural contexts in which these monumental works of classical art were first produced. Readings will emphasize the transition from a Republican form of government to an Empire under the rule of Augustus Caesar and the diversity of responses among individual authors to the profound structural changes that Roman society was undergoing at this time. Particular attention will be devoted to the reorganization of society and the self through textuality, the changing dimensions of the public and the private, the roles of class and gender, and the relationship between art and pleasure. Writings covering a wide variety of literary genres will include the works of Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, with additional readings from Cassius Dio for background.

This course will introduce you to the Western philosophical tradition through the study of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Cavendish, Hume, and Kant. You’ll grapple with questions that have been significant to philosophy from its beginnings: Questions about the nature of the mind, the existence of God, the foundations of knowledge, and the good life. You’ll also observe changes of intellectual outlook over time, and the effect of scientific, religious, and political concerns on the development of philosophical ideas.

Short Description:
A new and annotated translation of the French Prime Minister’s memoir of his friend, the most famous Impressionist painter.

Long Description:
In 1928, the former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau published Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (The Water-Lilies), a memoir of his longtime friend. Bruce Michelson has produced a new English translation, presented here with useful notes and illustrations.

Michelson’s translations of three short essays on art by Clemenceau, originally published by La Justice in the late XIX c., are included as appendices.

Published by Windsor & Downs Press, part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN). IOPN is a project of the University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Word Count: 40724

ISBN: 978-1-946011-00-8

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)

This seminar examines the history and legacy of the Cold War on American science. It explores scientist’s new political roles after World War II, ranging from elite policy makers in the nuclear age to victims of domestic anti Communism. It also examines the changing institutions in which the physical sciences and social sciences were conducted during the postwar decades, investigating possible epistemic effects on forms of knowledge. The subject closes by considering the place of science in the post-Cold War era.

Teaching Historical Literacy to School-Aged Readers

Short Description:
Colorado History Detectives enables school-aged readers to learn Colorado and American West history by doing it. Laugen and Frisbee guide students through the process of interpreting primary sources by starting with questions rather than answers. Find resources here for engaging students with key themes from Colorado's past. A free downloadable PDF version of this book is available here: http://digital.auraria.edu/IR00000092/00001

Long Description:
Colorado History Detectives enables school-aged readers to learn Colorado and American West history by doing it. MSU Denver History Department faculty Laugen and Frisbee guide students though the process of interpreting primary sources by starting with questions rather than answers. Thematically organized chapters include maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, diary excerpts, and other sources to create multiple opportunities for students to practice and master literacy and inquiry skills. Students can do history by reconstructing the past from different perspectives than a simple textbook would provide. Even elementary students can engage with the past by using this book. Cover design by Chrystyna Banks, MSU Denver.

Word Count: 39490

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

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.

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.

This is a college-level history of California that covers (in thirteen chapters) the state's history prior to Spanish colonization and up through the present day. Three major themes provide a unifying thread for the narrative: demographic and cultural diversity, California's relationship to the nation and world, and competing visions of the "California Dream," including contestations over the allocation of cultural, economic, and political power. The text is richly illustrated with maps, charts, photographs, and art.

Computer Histories is an introductory course on the history of computing that explores the questions 1) What is the history of computing? 2) What is the future of computing? and 3) What lessons can we learn from computing's past that will help guide us in determining computing's future?

Short Description:
The essays published here speak to the broad range of research being done in Canadian migration history; they also highlight the commitment of their authors to an engaged, public-facing scholarly practice. Read together, we believe they offer a much-needed historical perspective on contemporary Canadian debates around immigration and refuge, questions that cut to the heart of who we are as a society.

Long Description:
Confronting Canadian Migration History means two things. First, engaging with the history of population movements into, through, and from this territory, and their importance for our history as a multiethnic settler society. This has been one of the central projects of migration historians in Canada in recent decades. Second, to make and maintain a place for that historical knowledge in contemporary discussions of migration, and in doing so confront the present with the past. That latter goal is at the heart of this collection, which assembles in one volume fifteen texts published on ActiveHistory.ca over the last four years.

Word Count: 25644

ISBN: 978-1-9990201-3-2

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In this course the conquest and colonization of the Americas is considered, with special attention to the struggles of native peoples in Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, Panama, and colonial New England. In two segments of the course-one devoted to the Jesuit missionization of the Huron in the 1630s, the other to struggles between the government of Panama and the Kuna between 1900 and 1925-students examine primary documents such as letters, reports, and court records, to draw their own conclusions. Attention focuses on how we know about and represent past eras and other peoples, as well as on the history of struggles between native Americans and Europeans.

Short Description:
The contents of this online book were created by Prof. Rick Bonus and his students as a final project for a course on “Critical Filipinx American Histories” in the Fall quarter of 2019 at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. In collaboration with the UW Libraries, the UW Burke Museum, and the UW Department of American Ethnic Studies, this book explores and reflects on the relationships between Filipinx American histories and selected artifacts at the Burke Museum. It is a class project that was made possible by the Allen Open Textbook Grant.

Word Count: 18767

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically as part of a bulk import process by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided. As a result, there may be errors in formatting.)

This course is a series of presentations on an advanced topic in the field of geology by the visiting William Otis Crosby lecturer. The Crosby lectureship is awarded to a distinguished international scientist each year to introduce new scientific perspectives to the MIT community. This year’s Crosby lecturer is Prof. Kevin Burke. His lecture is about African history. The basic theme is the distinctiveness of the African continent in both the way that it originated 600 million years ago and in the way that it has developed ever since.

The subject of this course is the historical process by which the meaning of “technology” has been constructed. Although the word itself is traceable to the ancient Greek root teckhne (meaning art), it did not enter the English language until the 17th century, and did not acquire its current meaning until after World War I. The aim of the course, then, is to explore various sectors of industrializing 19th and 20th century Western society and culture with a view to explaining and assessing the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary (especially Anglo-American) thought and expression.
Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Technology and the Literary Imagination, Spring 2008.

This seminar considers “difference” and “sameness” as they have been conceived, experienced, and regulated by peoples of the Middle East, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. The first half discusses the Ottoman Empire by exploring how this multiethnic, polyglot empire survived for several relatively peaceful centuries and what happened when its formula for existence was challenged by politics based on mono-ethnic states. The second half of the course focuses on post-Ottoman nation-states, such as Turkey and Egypt, and Western-mandated Arab states, such as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. Finally, the course concludes with a case analysis of Israel.

This class is divided into a series of sections or “modules”, each of which concentrates on a particular large technology-related topic in a cultural context. The class will start with a four-week module on Samurai Swords and Blacksmithing, followed by smaller units on Chinese Cooking, the Invention of Clocks, and Andean Weaving, and end with a four-week module on Automobiles and Engines. In addition, there will be a series of hands-on projects that tie theory and practice together. The class discussions range across anthropology, history, and individual development, emphasizing recurring themes, such as the interaction between technology and culture and the relation between “skill” knowledge and “craft” knowledge.

Culture Tech evolved from a more extensive, two-semester course which formed the centerpiece of the Integrated Studies Program at MIT.  For 13 years, ISP was an alternative first-year program combining humanities, physics, learning-by-doing, and weekly luncheons.  Culture Tech represents the core principles of ISP distilled into a 6-unit seminar. Although many collections of topics have been used over the years, the modules presented here are a representative sequence.

This course examines computers anthropologically, as artifacts revealing the social orders and cultural practices that create them. Students read classic texts in computer science along with cultural analyses of computing history and contemporary configurations. It explores the history of automata, automation and capitalist manufacturing; cybernetics and WWII operations research; artificial intelligence and gendered subjectivity; robots, cyborgs, and artificial life; creation and commoditization of the personal computer; the growth of the Internet as a military, academic, and commercial project; hackers and gamers; technobodies and virtual sociality. Emphasis is placed on how ideas about gender and other social differences shape labor practices, models of cognition, hacking culture, and social media.

This subject offers a broad survey of texts (both literary and philosophical) drawn from the Western tradition and selected to trace the immediate intellectual antecedents and some of the implications of the ideas animating Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s text, of course, is about the mechanism that drives the evolution of life on this planet, but the fundamental ideas of the text have implications that range well beyond the scope of natural history, and the assumptions behind Darwin’s arguments challenge ideas that go much further back than the set of ideas that Darwin set himself explicitly to question - ideas of decisive importance when we think about ourselves, the nature of the material universe, the planet that we live upon, and our place in its scheme of life. In establishing his theory of natural selection, Darwin set himself, rather self-consciously, to challenge a whole way of thinking about these things. The main focus of attention will be Darwin’s contribution to the so-called “argument from design” - the notion that innumerable aspects of the world (and most particularly the organisms within it) display features directly analogous to objects of human design and, since design implies a designer, that an intelligent, conscious agency must have been responsible for their organization and creation. Previously, it had been argued that such features must have only one of two ultimate sources - chance or conscious agency. Darwin proposed and elaborated a third source, which he called Natural Selection, an unconscious agency capable of outdoing the most complex feats of human intelligence.
The course of study will not only examine the immediate inspiration for this idea in the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus and place Darwin’s Origin and the theory of Natural Selection in the history of ensuing debate, but it will also touch upon related issues.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

Revisualizing Modern Japanese History at 150

Short Description:
Digital Meijis: Re-visualising Modern Japanese History at 150 is a curated and edited collection on the Meiji Period. By pairing digitized materials and documents with historical narrative and interpretive analysis, the “visual essays” contained within encourage readers to review and rethink modern Japanese history through images.

Long Description:
Digital Meijis: Re-visualising Modern Japanese History at 150 grew out of one aspect of this larger project, the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource. Curated and edited by Tristan Grunow and Naoko Kato, the Meiji at 150 Digital Teaching Resource and this companion volume were designed to present and widely disseminate research on the Meiji Period in a public format designed for easy adoption in the Japanese studies classroom. By pairing digitized materials and documents with historical narrative and interpretive analysis, the “visual essays” contained within encourage readers to review and rethink modern Japanese history through images.

Word Count: 69194

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)