341 - 350 of 788 results for: HISTORY

Between 1200-1600, Venice created a powerful empire at the boundary between East and West that controlled much of the Mediterranean, with a merchant society that allowed social groups, religions, and ethnicities to coexist. Topics include the features of Venetian society, the relationship between center and periphery, order and disorder, orthodoxy and heresy, the role of politics, art, and culture in the Venetian Renaissance, and the empire's decline as a political power and reinvention as a tourist site and living museum.

Colloquium on the history of early modern European cities, covering urbanization, street life, neighborhoods, fortifications, guilds and confraternities, charity, vagrancy, and begging, public health, city-countryside relationship, urban constitutions, and confederations. Assignments include annotated bibliography, book review, and a final paper. Second-quarter continuation of research seminar available (HIST299S or HIST402).

English political and religious culture from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War of the 1640s. Themes include the growth of the size and power of the state, Reformation, creation of a Protestant regime, transformation of the political culture of the ruling elite, emergence of Puritanism, and causes of the Civil War. HISTORY 333 is a prerequisite for HISTORY 402 (Spring quarter).

Current scholarship on Britain,1640-1700, focusing on political and religious history. Topics include: causes and consequences of the English civil war and revolution; rise and fall of revolutionary Puritanism; the Restoration; popular politics in the late 17th century; changing contours of religious life; the crisis leading to the Glorious Revolution; and the new order that emerged after the deposing of James II.

1500 to 1700. Theorists include Hobbes, Locke, Harrington, the Levellers, and lesser known writers and schools. Foundational ideas and problems underlying modern British and American political thought and life.

The early modern world saw Catholicism transform itself into a global faith. Missionaries traveled with expanding Portuguese, Spanish, French empires, and beyond to translate their message of salvation into every culture possible from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy to the Japanese shogunate. No group was more instrumental in this regard than the Jesuits. Between 1534 and its suppression by the pope in 1773, the Society of Jesus grew from seven founding members to several thousand worldwide. As evangelizers they operated at boundaries of political, cultural, and metaphysical conflict. As global observers they became astronomers, linguists, ethnographers, historians, and mapmakers. We will critically examine Jesuit strategies to expand their religious network across every inhabitable continent, as well as the distinctive range of reactions from host societies. The extraordinary range of mission fields challenges us with issues of political and cultural conflict, integration, and appropriation. What did it mean to globalize religion in this era? How did missionaries facilitate and maneuver societal confrontation, and how did this conflict shape lasting knowledge and faith?

This course explores the European Enlightenment: the eighteenth-century intellectual and cultural movement that gave rise to some of the ideas that informed the American and French political revolutions at the end of the century. These included ideas of human equality and human rights, and the foundation of knowledge and authority in reason and experience rather than in religion and tradition. At the same time, Enlightenment writers also habitually ranked human beings by sex, race, and class and drew upon the European conquest and plunder of the rest of the world to frame their theories. Because of its importance and its profound contradictions, the Enlightenment has recently been the focus of much controversy. In the course, we will discuss all of this - the ideas, the contradictions, and the controversy.

In April of 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, a huge controversy erupted in Germany on the relation between Postcolonial and Holocaust Studies. Previously, in 2012, Judith Butler on the occasion of being awarded the Adorno Prize was assailed for her support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This time, the philosopher Achille Mbembe, from Cameroon, the former German colony, was accused of antisemitism. His comparison of Israel with the apartheid state in South Africa and his critique of Palestine's occupation as a form of settler colonialism is condemned for relativizing the Holocaust and questioning the Israeli state's right to exist. The allegation of "postcolonial antisemitism" resurfaced in 2022 in the context of the Documenta 15 in Kassel. The curators, ruangrupa, an Indonesian art collective, are accused of antisemitism, of supporting BDS and of the "silent boycott" of Jewish-Israeli artists.These controversies confront us with the challenge of how to think together antisemitism and racism. In this class, we will engage with critical scholarship to address the conundrums of memory politics and to engage with the "unfinished conversations" between Jewish and Postcolonial Studies.

(Undergraduates, enroll in 234P. Graduates, enroll in 334P) The arrival of plague in Eurasia in 1347-51 affected many late medieval and early modern societies. It transformed their understanding of disease, raised questions about the efficacy of medical knowledge, and inspired new notions of public health. This class explores the history of medicine in the medieval Islamic and European worlds. Changing ideas about the body, the roles of different healers and religion in healing, the growth of hospitals and universities, and the evolution of medical theory and practice will be discussed. How did medicine and society change in the age of plague?