211 - 220 of 788 results for: HISTORY

( CSRE 55F is 3 units; CSRE 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.

What is the history of debt in America? How has indebtedness become an inescapable condition for some, and a virtue for others? What can we learn from the forgotten efforts of those who issued debt, lived in debt, struggled through debt, and mobilized in and around debt? This survey course examines the links between debt, power, development, and mobility. Together, we will see how debt transformed daily life in North America over the past 500 years, and spot moments when collective action undermined the supposed unbreakable terms of indebtedness. This class neither presumes a background in economics, nor previous coursework in history.

The United States Constitution has been the nation's fundamental law since it was adopted over two centuries ago. Along the way, it has provided the basic framework through which Americans have governed themselves and secured their fundamental liberty. It has also been an endless site of struggle as Americans, in debating the reach of national power, slavery, democracy, equality, personal autonomy, and much else, have vigorously disputed not simply what the Constitution means and licenses but more fundamentally what it even is. This course offers a broad overview of this expansive history from its eighteenth-century origins to our modern era. It focuses on pivotal developments and debates that have shaped the constitutional order and the various institutions and actors who have played an important role in that process, not simply the Supreme Court and the cases it has decided, but also the other branches of government, the political process, and the social movements that have mobilized new understandings of the Constitution to advance their goals. It emphasizes contest and change through law, politics, and culture, exploring how the Constitution has been at once a political and legal document as well a source of national identity that binds generations to one another.

This course will explore the rise and fall of slavery in what became the United States from its colonial origins in 1619 through the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with an eye toward placing American slavery in a broader Atlantic context. We will examine the economic, racial, religious, cultural, legal, and political underpinnings of the institution, and evaluate the profound ways it shaped - and continues to shape - American society. We will analyze how American slavery was understood and experienced and consider how the stories we tell ourselves about American slaves and slavery have evolved over time. This course will conclude with a look at the impact of emancipation on Black life in America and slavery's enduring legacy.

Major periods of evolution, particularly since the mid-19th century. Premise: insights into contemporary higher education can be obtained through its antecedents, particularly regarding issues of governance, mission, access, curriculum, and the changing organization of colleges and universities.

I am the resident historian at the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. I invite you to join me in this course in an experiment and an adventure. First, the adventure. This course provides an introduction to modern American history by diving deep into the past of the very place in which it is taught. We will cover centuries of history: from the lives of the Ohlone people going back to time immemorial to the Spanish Conquest in the 18th century, from the founding of Stanford in the 1880s to the invention of the microchip in the 1950s to the more recent rise of the world-spanning companies now known as the "Magnificent Seven." Through these events, we will learn how history has been made and who has made it - not only by conquistadors and CEOs but by contests over power and freedom led by peoples of all kinds. Second, the experiment. We will learn in this course not only who made history but how history as a body of knowledge is made. We will do this above by all making history of our own. The course will take regular visits to the historians' workshop, which in our case also happens to be the world center for the study of our very subject: the Silicon Valley Archives in Special Collections at Green Library. Through engagement with the archives, students will make history of their own: a paper documenting some aspect of the history of this place. Working in groups, students will also make an important contribution to this history by recording an oral history with a participant in the history of the Valley.

This course explores the ways that individuals and movements for social and economic equality have redefined and contested gender and sexuality in the modern United States. Using a combination of primary and secondary sources, we will explore the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the politics of woman suffrage, racial justice, reproductive rights, and gay and trans rights, as well as conservative and right-wing responses. Majors and non-majors alike are welcome.

Though it ended twenty years ago, we still live in a world shaped by the Cold War. Beginning with its origins in the mid-1940s, this course will trace the evolution of the global struggle, until its culmination at the end of the 1980s. Students will be asked to ponder the fundamental nature of the Cold War, what kept it alive for nearly fifty years, how it ended, and its long term legacy for the world. As distinguished from the lecture taught in previous quarters, this class will closely investigate ten major Cold War battlegrounds over the quarter. Selected case studies will include: the division of Germany, Iran in the 1950s, Cuba, Vietnam, the Six Day War, the Chilean coup, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Central America, and the Eastern European revolutions of 1989. Students will be asked to consult a combination of original documents and recent histories.

This course examines the historical relationship between the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the United States from multiple perspectives: between the US and Cuban governments, between Cubans both for and against the Revolution, between a diversity of US Americans and postrevolutionary Cuba, and others. We will begin with the origins of the Cuban Revolution and the critical role of the United States in them and then analyze postrevolutionary Cuban-US relations drawing on a variety of sources, including memoirs, speeches, oral histories, declassified documents, and various media productions (newspapers, magazines, documentaries, film, and so forth).