This textbook is divided into three sections: Africa, Asia & Americas, and Europe. It explores the history of the world from pre-historic times to 1300 C.E., paying specific attention to the interconnections (or disconnections) between peoples and regions. Students are encouraged to think beyond their experiences with western civilizations to recognize the widespread impact of historical events and trends, including how they helped shape the world today. Touching upon each world region, the readings investigate the impact of environment, economics, politics, and religion on diverse societies. Key topics are sites of change and integration such as the rise of cities, religion, technology, migration and trade, the spread of disease, gender relationships, warfare and social movements.

This course covers the history of Rome from its humble beginnings to the 5th century A.D. The first half covers Kingship to Republican form; the conquest of Italy; Roman expansion: Pyrrhus, Punic Wars and provinces; classes, courts, and the Roman revolution; Augustus and the formation of empire. The second half covers Virgil to the Vandals; major social, economic, political and religious trends at Rome and in the provinces. There is an emphasis on the use of primary sources in translation.

Short Description:
The Ancient & Medieval World is a collaborative, open educational resource designed to help students better understand a world long removed from their contemporary experience. The text uses a modular format where students are provided with a brief introduction to each theme, several primary sources, interpretive material written by subject-matter experts, relevant maps and timelines, and visual sources, as well as a glossary of unfamiliar terms. Each module can be used as the foundation of a course assignment or thematic lesson.

Word Count: 75897

ISBN: 978-1-989864-59-3

(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.)

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 question, “What Is Life?” today.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 question, “What Is Life?” today.

This class has been reorganized to focus primarily on the War in Iraq. As in previous years, the class still examines war in cross-cultural perspective, asking whether war is intrinsic to human nature, what causes war, how particular cultural experiences of war differ, and how war has affected American culture.

This course examines traditional performances of the Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East and North Africa. Starting with the history of the ways in which the West has discovered, translated and written about the Orient, we will consider how power and politics play roles in the production of culture, narrative and performance. This approach assumes that performance, verbal art, and oral literature lend themselves to spontaneous adaptation and to oblique expression of ideas and opinions whose utterance would otherwise be censorable or disruptive. In particular we will be concerned with the way traditional performance practices are affected by and respond to the consequences of modernization.
Topics include oral epic performance, sacred narrative, Koranic chant performance, the folktale, solo performance, cultural production and resistance.

This course introduces students to the spatial, legal, economic, social and political structures that created apartheid in South Africa, and to the factors that led to the collapse of the racist order. We will examine the many forms of Black oppression and, also, the various forms of resistance to apartheid. Some of the themes we will explore include industrialization and the formation of the Black working classes; the constructions of race, ethnicities, and sexualities; land alienation and rural struggles; township poverty and violence; Black education; the African National Congress; and the Black Consciousness Movement.

Pomona College -- fall 2022

Word Count: 33688

(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.)

Cairo is the quintessential Islamic city. Founded in 634 at the strategic head of the Nile Delta, the city evolved from an Islamic military outpost to the seat of the ambitious Fatimid caliphate which flourished between the 10th and 12th century. Its most spectacular age, however, was the Mamluk period (1250-1517), when it became the uncontested center of a resurgent Islam and acquired an architectural character that symbolized the image of the Islamic city for centuries to come.
Cairo today still shines as a cultural and political center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, many of its monuments (456 registered by the 1951 Survey of the Islamic Monuments of Cairo) still stand, although they remain largely unknown to the world’s architectural community and their numbers are dwindling at an exceedingly alarming pace.

The course examines the earliest emergence of stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the context of the first wave of British Imperialism and the expanded powers of the Catholic Church during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The morphology of Arthurian romance will be set off against original historical documents and chronicle sources for the English conquests in Brittany, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to understand the ways in which these new attitudes towards Empire were being mythologized. Authors will include Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Gerald of Wales, together with some lesser known works like the Perilous Graveyard, the Knight with the Sword, and Perlesvaus, or the High History of the Holy Graal. Special attention will be paid to how the narrative material of the story gets transformed according to the particular religious and political agendas of each new author.

“The Art of the Probable” addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, our objective is to focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world.
Our course therefore aims to broaden students’ appreciation for and understanding of how literature interacts with – both reflecting upon and contributing to – the scientific understanding of the world. We are just as centrally committed to encouraging students to regard imaginative literature as a unique contribution to knowledge in its own right, and to see literary works of art as objects that demand and richly repay close critical analysis. It is our hope that the course will serve students well if they elect to pursue further work in Literature or other discipline in SHASS, and also enrich or complement their understanding of probability and statistics in other scientific and engineering subjects they elect to take.

We will explore images that pertain to the emergence of Japan as a modern state. We will focus on images that depict Japan as it comes into contact with the rest of the world after its long and deep isolation during the feudal period. We will also cover city planning of Tokyo that took place after WWII, and such topics as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
A unique feature of this offering is that we will run it concurrently with the edX MOOC and two University of Tokyo MOOCs, Visualizing Postwar Tokyo and Four Faces of Contemporary Japanese Architecture, for much of the remainder of the class.

This Freshman Advising Seminar surveys the many applications of magnets and magnetism. To the Chinese and Greeks of ancient times, the attractive and repulsive forces between magnets must have seemed magical indeed. Through the ages, miraculous curative powers have been attributed to magnets, and magnets have been used by illusionists to produce “magical” effects. Magnets guided ships in the Age of Exploration and generated the electrical industry in the 19th century. Today they store information and entertainment on disks and tapes, and produce sound in speakers, images on TV screens, rotation in motors, and levitation in high-speed trains. Students visit various MIT projects related to magnets (including superconducting electromagnets) and read about and discuss the history, legends, pseudoscience, science, and technology of types of magnets, including applications in medicine. Several short written reports and at least one oral presentation will be required of each participant.

Letters from Small-Town Minnesota

Short Description:
In August 1934, Corinna Stafford traveled from her home in Atwater, Minnesota, to Floral Park, New York, to care for her aunt and uncle’s children. During the year Corinna was in New York, her mother Ruth Stafford wrote her two or three times a week, with details of daily life in the village of Atwater and Kandiyohi County. This book is a compilation of those letters. [Cover design by Andrea McKennan.]

Word Count: 91537

ISBN: 978-1-7335927-0-3

(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.)

What does Australia’s Constitution say about national identity? A conventional answer might be ‘not much’. Yet recent constitutional controversies raise issues about the recognition of First Peoples, the place of migrants and dual citizens, the right to free speech, the nature of our democracy, and our continuing connection to the British monarchy. These are constitutional questions, but they are also questions about who we are as a nation.

This edited collection brings together legal, historical, and political science scholarship. These diverse perspectives reveal a wealth of connections between the Australian Constitution and Australia’s national identity.

A Brief Introduction

Short Description:
A brief introduction to authentic learning using anthropological ethnography. This resource utilizes ethnographic case studies to illustrate the concepts of authentic learning.

Word Count: 5997

(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.)

Short Description:
George Washington Owens was the son of former slaves who migrated to Kansas in the early 1870s to find free land, finally settling in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, near Alma. It was there that he was born in 1875. In his handwritten autobiography, Owens chronicles the difficulties and successes of working hard growing up on the plains and as a student at District School #3 of Alma, and then at Kansas State Agricultural College. After learning that no African American had graduated from KSAC (now Kansas State University), “he resolved to be the first.” He did so, graduating in 1899. Owens continues by describing how he was recruited to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to work under Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, and the methods he used as head of the dairy herd. While at Tuskegee, Owens recalls the marriage to his wife, Waddie L. Hill, a graduate of Clark University, and the successes of their three children. In 1908 his accomplishments at Tuskegee led Owens to becoming a faculty member at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (Virginia State University) where he distinguished himself as head of the agricultural program and a leader in vocational agriculture in the South. Owens recorded his life five years before his death in 1950. Ana Elnora Owens, daughter of George and Waddie Owens, donated the autobiography, photographs, and other documents, to the Richard L.D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections, Hale Library, in 1978.

Word Count: 4377

(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.)

Online OER text created for U.S. History to 1865 by Dr. June Klees for Bay College.

© 2017 Bay College and Content Creators. Except where otherwise noted this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Online OER text created for U.S. History 1865 to Present by Dr. June Klees for Bay College.

© 2017 Bay College and Content Creators. Except where otherwise noted this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.