261 - 270 of 788 results for: HISTORY

What can digital mapping and spatial analysis bring to history? How have historians written spatial history in the past? How do scholars in other disciplines deal with space and what can we learn from them? The course provides students with conceptual and technical skills in spatial history. As part of the exercise to think spatially about the past, students will receive training in Geographic Informational Science (GIS) and develop their own spatial history projects. No prior technical skills are needed for this course.

The involvement of U.S. and the UN in major wars and international interventions since the 1991 Gulf War. The UN Charter's provisions on the use of force, the origins and evolution of peacekeeping, the reasons for the breakthrough to peacemaking and peace enforcement in the 90s, and the ongoing debates over the legality and wisdom of humanitarian intervention. Case studies include Croatia and Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, and Afghanistan. *International Relations majors taking this course to fulfill the WiM requirement should enroll in INTNLREL 140C for 5 units.

Can historical thinking produce more humane forms of governance? This course exposes students to the discipline of history as an instrument of policy critique and formulation. Students will pursue their own research projects with the option of creating papers and/or audio/visual products.

Many of the basic commodities that we consider staples of everyday life became part of an increasingly interconnected world of trade, goods, and consumption between 1200 and 1800. This seminar offers an introduction to the material culture of the late medieval and early modern world, with an emphasis on the role of European trade and empires in these developments. We will examine recent work on the circulation, use, and consumption of things, starting with the age of the medieval merchant, and followed by the era of the Columbian exchange in the Americas that was also the world of the Renaissance collector, the Ottoman patron, and the Ming connoisseur. This seminar will explore the material horizons of an increasingly interconnected world, with the rise of the Dutch East India Company and other trading societies, and the emergence of the Atlantic economy. It concludes by exploring classic debates about the "birth" of consumer society in the eighteenth century. How did the meaning of things and people's relationships to them change over these centuries? What can we learn about the past by studying things? This course requires a permission number to enroll. Please reach out to Professor Findlen at pfindlen@stanford.edu to request permission to enroll in the course.

Do you think a banana can become a symbol of capitalist globalization? This course uncovers the pivotal histories of commodities that have shaped the modern global economy from the 17th century onward. Students will examine how the cultivation, extraction, processing, and trade of these goods catalyzed economic, social, and ecological transformations, fueling colonial and industrial economies, establishing global markets, and forging enduring dependencies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore how commodities connected distant regions, forged global empires, and altered ecosystems. How did slavery change the palate of the Western world? Why did rubber become the backbone of industrial expansion? How have fossil fuels transformed global infrastructure? And why has the demand for "superfoods" redefined agricultural landscapes? By "following the thing," we will delve into the commodification of land, labor, and resources, unveiling the capitalist legacies that underpin today's economy. Through case studies and discussions, this course invites students to journey alongside commodities, uncovering the intricate web of humans, goods, and capitalism that have shaped our interconnected world.

Clausewitz conceptualized war as always consisting of a trinity of passion, chance, and reason, mirrored, respectively, in the people, army and government. Following Clausewitz, this course examines the peoples, armies, and governments that shaped World War II. Analyzes the ideological, political, diplomatic and economic motivations and constraints of the belligerents and their resulting strategies, military planning and fighting. Explores the new realities of everyday life on the home fronts and the experiences of non-combatants during the war, the final destruction of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan, and the emerging conflict between the victors. How the peoples, armies and governments involved perceived their possibilities and choices as a means to understand the origins, events, dynamics and implications of the greatest war in history.

Historical and contemporary perspectives on climate politics. Briefly covers the origins of climate understanding in the 1800s, then turns to the co-evolution of climate science and climate politics from the 20th century to the present, including multiple political issues and debates that established human impacts on the global atmosphere. The last half of the course focuses on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 2015 Paris Agreement, the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, organized climate disinformation, and the future of international climate policy and fossil fuels. Assignments include in-class presentations and a policy brief or research paper.

This course will explore the history, politics, and character of genocide from the beginning of world history to the present. It will also consider the ways that the international system has developed to prevent and punish genocide.

Modern economists have made a science of studying the aggregate effects of individual choices. This science is based on the realities of personal freedom and individual choice. Prior to the modern era, however, different realities comprised very different economic cultures: moral economies in which greed was evil and generosity benefitted the patron's soul; familial collectives operating within historical conditioned diasporas; economies of obligation that threatened to collapse under their own weight as economic structures shifted. In this course we will be reading cross-culturally to develop an understanding of the shared and distinct elements of premodern economic cultures.