This course is an examination of popular perceptions and constructions of the Middle Ages and their relationship to the reality of medieval life and history. Through film and lecture we will examine common assumptions held in the modern world about the nature of central features of medieval life, culture, and institutions. These assumptions will then be compared with the corresponding reality of existence in the Middle Ages.
Between the end of the First World War in 1919 and the Second World War in 1945, the United States became a modern nation. Signs of the "modernism" were everywhere: in the rise of cities and urban cultures; in the mass media and its obsession with celebrity; in new norms about consumption and pleasure; in the politics of government activism and the welfare state; in new ideas about gender roles and sexual freedoms; and in new conceptions of ethnic and racial pluralism. In this course, we will examine the tensions, fears, and dreams surrounding the American transition to modernism in the 1920s and 1930s.
The central political, legal, and moral issue for the United States after 1945 was equality: of class and race; gender and sexuality; and many related issues. This post-war "search for equality" poses important and challenging questions: What is equality? How is equality determined? Is legal equality sufficient, or are laws fairly toothless compared to opportunities for jobs, housing, health care, social respect, cultural authority, and individual autonomy? Do we seek an "equality of opportunity" or an "equality of outcomes"? This course will explore these and related questions as they have shaped American history over the last 70 years.
For American students, Mexico might be the best known and paradoxically the least understood foreign country. You will learn the major events, people, and cultural trends that have shaped the Mexican people of today. Our course will start with the major indigenous cultures (Aztecs of the title) and end with the current drug war (the Zetas cartel). We will emphasize four main themes: the cultural weight of Catholicism, the complicated role of indigenous peoples in the nation-state, the epic struggle to govern a vast country, and the love/hate relationship of Mexicans with the United States.
A foundational course for students majoring in history, it examines various intellectual approaches applied to the study of the past, the history of the discipline, and the methods of historical research and writing. It is designed to enhance student effectiveness in subsequent history courses. History majors only.
This course presents an historical analysis of Lakota/Dakota history from pre-European contact to the present. Examining the political, economic, familial, gender, and educational transformations of the Lakota/Dakota over the course of three centuries, students learn to identify both the continuities and discontinuities with Siouan culture. Such an examination introduces students to a group of people whose culture, and some would say priorities, sit outside that of the majority culture.
This course gives students the essential information to understand the people and forces that have shaped today's Latin America. We begin in the era of European exploration in the 1450s and end with the violence of the drug trade at the turn of the twenty-first century. Along the way, we show how Latin Americans grappled with conquest, Catholicism, and slavery. We will analyze the dynamics of revolutions and radical politics of the twentieth century in places like Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico.
An examination of the development of American journalism from colonial times to the present. Using primary source readings and films, in addition to textbooks, the course will examine changes within the journalism industry itself, the response of that industry to changes in American society and culture, and the effects journalism has had on American life.
Special Topics in History.