361 - 370 of 788 results for: HISTORY

In this course, we will read major British literary works of the age of empire to explore the relationship between imperialism and modern literature. We will attend to the way imperialism shaped the evolution of a range of genres, from romantic to gothic to mystery to the spy novel, fantasy, and modernism, reading works by authors such as Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Agatha Christie, and others. This course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Mondays you meet in your own course, and on Wednesdays all the HumCore seminars (in session that quarter) meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

Why and how did Europeans claim control of 70% of African in the late nineteenth century? Students will engage with historiographical debates ranging from the national (e.g. British) to the topical (e.g. international law). Students will interrogate some of the primary sources on which debaters have rested their arguments. Key discussions include: the British occupation of Egypt; the autonomy of French colonial policy; the mystery of Germany's colonial entry; and, not least, the notorious Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.

Calls for the U.S. and Europe to pay reparations for slavery and colonial crimes have proliferated in recent years. While discussions of reparations today often center around slavery and empire, reparations have historically been pursued, and successfully won, in a range of circumstances. The premise of this course is that we can better understand the nature of reparations claims by considering the historical record. Each week we will study a particular reparations case or theme and try and tease out the legal, political, moral, and economic logic that undergirds it. Our goal is to deepen our understanding of reparative ethics: what makes reparations distinct from other kinds of settlements? Do reparations require an exchange of money? What kinds of harms have historically generated demands for compensation from the state? Is this a settlement oriented towards the past or the future? What goals have been envisioned by those who have fought for reparations: Restitution? Reconciliation? Atonement? Cases we will study include the compensation demanded or paid for slavery, domestic labor, colonial violence, climate-related harms, war damages, and genocide. Readings of primary and secondary sources will be paired with works by political and social theorists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, W.E.B. Du Bois, Saidiya Hartman, Silvia Federici, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, John Maynard Keynes, and Hannah Arendt.

What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This course examines tcourse examines these questions in the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon. This course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Mondays you meet in your own course, and on Wednesdays all the HumCore seminars (in session that quarter) meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

This colloquium for advanced undergraduate and graduate students will investigate the political economy of modern empire, focusing on the British empire. Topics include the history of imperial corporations; industry and empire; the commodification of nature and life; racial capitalism; the formation of the global economy; the relationship between trafficking and free trade; and the relationship between empire and the theory and practice of development.

At a basic level, history is the study of change over time. But the modern discipline of history, as it was formed during the Enlightenment, radically changed conceptions of time itself: from something at times understood as cyclical or directionless to something linear and teleological. Modern history then prompted further reconceptualizations of time: Capitalism introduced new ways of valuing time; the Darwinian revolution introduced a new scale of earthly time; the world wars dented faith in the idea that time passed in the direction of progress; and now climate change has altered conceptions of time in a new way. This course examines evolving understandings of the medium of the historian's craft: what is time? We will examine poetic, scientific, literary, and geographical conceptions of time and trace time's modern history: how colonialism and capitalism produced new experiences of time, and anticolonial and anticapitalist critiques of those experiences. Throughout, we will consider how this history should shape the way historians think about change over time, in terms of questions of scale, human experience, and disciplinary purpose.

This course examines the history of evolutionary biology from its emergence around the middle of the eighteenth century. We will consider the continual engagement of evolutionary theories of life with a larger, transforming context: philosophical, political, social, economic, institutional, aesthetic, artistic, literary. Our goal will be to achieve a historically rich and nuanced understanding of how evolutionary thinking about life has developed to its current form.

What enabled Leonardo da Vinci to excel in over a dozen fields from painting to engineering and to anticipate flight four hundred years before the first aircraft took off? How did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel Ceiling? What forces and insights led Machiavelli to write "The Prince"? An historical moment and a cultural era, the Italian Renaissance famously saw monumental achievements in literature, art, and architecture, influential developments in science and technology, and the flourishing of multi-talented individuals who contributed profoundly, expertly, and simultaneously to very different fields. In this course on the great thinkers, writers, and achievers of the Italian Renaissance, we will study these "universal geniuses" and their world. Investigating the writings, thought, and lives of such figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Galileo Galilei, we will interrogate historical and contemporary ideas concerning genius, creativity, and the phenomenon of "Renaissance man" known as polymathy. Taught in English.

This course follows the history of attention from the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism to Cold War controversies over mind control and recent debates on the attention economy and the ethics of technology. Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, which regulates what enters consciousness. In an age of information abundance, digital technologies compete to catch and direct our attention. Offering a historical perspective, the course readings trace how attention has been constructed, studied, commodified, and manipulated throughout the modern period by travelling across various regions including the Middle East, Europe, the Caribbean and North America. Consideration will be given to the training and altering of attention, to spectacle and the manipulation of attention, and to the shifting economies of attention. We will explore how practices such as mesmerism, hypnotism, and conjure became part of power relationships within social, racial, gendered, religious and cultural contexts, and how attention was made to reproduce different relationships of inequality between the industrial revolution and the advent of surveillance capitalism. The course is divided into three parts. It begins with introducing approaches to attention by historians, philosophers, and scholars of visual studies among others. Second is a more empirical analysis of how slavery, industrialism, advertising, cinema, science, and technology came together to shape modern theories of attention. The course then ends with several weeks on the current politics of attention and the attention economy.