271 - 280 of 788 results for: HISTORY

Scholars pay a lot of attention to knowledge but tend to ignore ignorance, even though ignorance defines many parts of our world. Think climate denial, anti-vaxxers, filter bubble myopia, etc. Here we explore the history of ignorance through case studies, focusing on how cigarette makers created the template for climate change denial and how can science can be used to produce ignorance. We'll look at rhetorical strategies to produce dis- and misinformation, and how these can be overcome. Students will produce a research paper tracing the origins and impact of a particular form of ignorance.

This class explores, through analysis and practice, the ways in which history can be told and experienced through means other than traditional scholarly narratives. Approaches include literary fiction and non-fiction, digital media, graphic arts, maps, exhibitions, and film. A final project will require students to produce their own innovative work of history. History Majors completing the capstone requirement through this course should enroll in HISTORY 299CA.

Advanced research into the history of ignorance. Our goal will be to explore how ignorance is created, maintained and destroyed, using case studies from topics such as tobacco denialism, global climate denialism, and other forms of resistance to knowledge making. Course culminates in a research paper on the theory and practice of agnotology, the science of ignorance.

This course analyzes the evolution and nature of revolutionary and totalitarian polities through the reading of monographs on the Puritan Reformation, French Revolutionary, turn of the 20th Century, interwar, and Second World War eras. Among topics explored are the essence of modern ideology and politics, the concept of the body national and social, the modern state, state terror, charismatic leadership, private and public spheres, totalitarian economies, and identities and practices in totalitarian polities.

( History 204G/ POLISCI 104G/ INTNLREL 104G is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 304G is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) How Western societies and cultures have responded to modern warfare. The relationship between its destructive capacity and effects on those who produce, are subject to, and must come to terms with its aftermath. Literary representations of WW I; destructive psychological effects of modern warfare including those who take pleasure in killing; changes in relations between the genders; consequences of genocidal ideology and racial prejudice; the theory of just war and its practical implementation; how wars end and commemorated.

From as early as the sixteenth century to our present moment, capitalism has been a central part of modern world history. The history of capitalism is not solely one of wealth and development, but also one of extraction and exploitation. It is a history that scholars have conceptualized as racial capitalism. This course explores the global structures of inequality that are inherent to capitalism and how they have changed over time. Students will engage with key scholarly debates and theoretical concepts, which they will then apply to specific case studies in different parts of the world with a particular focus on commodities.

(Graduate students must enroll for 5 units.) Students will analyze, in historical perspective, the similarities and differences between the development of Latin America and East Asia from early modern times to the present. Focusing primarily on Brazil and Mexico, on one hand, and China and Japan, on the other, topics will include the impact of colonial and postcolonial relationships on the development of states, markets, and classes, as well as geopolitical, social, cultural, technological and environmental factors that shaped, and were shaped by, them.

What does it mean to be human if thinking and reasoning can be done by a machine? The advent and proliferation of generative AI tools raises a host of profound and unsettling questions. While some herald the AI revolution and its promise to liberate us from mental drudgery, others prophecy doom and oppression. While the technology might be new, the anxiety and ambivalence are not. From Socrates, who worried that the technology of writing would "implant forgetfulness in the learners' soul," to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who quipped, "machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them," writers and thinkers across place and time have looked on with horror and awe, hope and despair, as technology has transformed the way we live, work, and gain knowledge of our world. In this intellectual history seminar, we will read classic texts that have engaged with questions related to technological innovation and taken stock of both its promise and peril. Readings include work by Plato, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Alan Turing, and Donna Haraway. Alongside these texts we will consider some of the historical developments and themes that motivated these authors: industrialization, the mechanization of warfare, nuclear destruction, the space age, the rise of consumer culture, environmental degradation, the spread of surveillance technologies, and reproductive freedom. Through reading, discussing, and working out complex ideas together, this class will give us a deeper vocabulary and conceptual framework for thinking through the current moment.

( History 205K is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 305K is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) This course examines the "Age of Revolution," spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. Primarily, this course will focus on the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions (which overthrew both French and white planter rule). Taken together, these events reshaped definitions of citizenship, property, and government. But could republican principles-- color-blind in rhetoric-- be so in fact? Could nations be both republican and pro-slavery? Studying a wide range of primary materials, this course will explore the problem of revolution in an age of empires, globalization, and slavery.