621 - 630 of 788 results for: HISTORY

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.

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.

This course explores the development of scientific inquiry in relation to the major intellectual, cultural, religious, and political developments of the early modern period, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. We will examine how new approaches to understanding the natural world established the foundations of the modern sciences. Our protagonists will include Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Linnaeus, and plenty of less famous but equally fascinating figures. We will consider the social, global and imperial contexts of early modern science, the importance of material culture - instruments, collections, artistic productions - and the circulation of scientific ideas between laboratories, academies, courts, and the public sphere. By the end of the course, students will have learned to detect the myriad ways in which scientific ideas and practices reflect the world of their making.

( History 242J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 342J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) London began the nineteenth century as a city of one million, but was home to over six million people by the century's end. How did Londoners in the nineteenth century respond to the challenges and temptations of life in a growing metropolis? How did government and reformers try to influence and control city dwellers' behavior? This class seeks to answer these questions by exploring life in Britain's capital in the nineteenth century, using the digital database 'London Low Life' as a guide. Contemporary street literature, night-life guides, pamphlets, broadsides, images, reformer's tracts, and public-interest journalism are some of the sources that will give us a window into vice, virtue, and daily life in London during a period of great uncertainty and change.

Explores the global circulation of plants, peoples, disease, medicines, technologies, and knowledge. Considers primarily Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and focuses on their exchanges in the Caribbean, in particular within the French and British empires. We also take examples from other knowledge traditions, where relevant. Readings treat science and medicine in relation to voyaging, the natural history of plants, environmental exchange, racism, and slavery in colonial contexts. Colonial sciences and medicines were important militarily and strategically for positioning emerging nation states in global struggles for land and resources. Upper-level undergrads must apply for 243C; please fill in this short form: https://forms.gle/XpUXwfT6ULiwC8P19 Graduate students taking the course should enroll in 343C.

This course will use our current experience with the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens to study the processes by which infectious diseases emerge. Because of recent developments in the "historicist sciences" (bioarchaeology and palaeogenetics), it is possible to piece together the origin stories of some of the world's most impactful diseases. How does a "microbe's-eye view" of disease emergence change our understanding of past (and present) pandemics? Is it possible that understanding emergence might help us better understand why certain diseases have continued to proliferate, refusing to yield to modern interventions?We will focus on several major diseases transmitted between the Old and New Worlds before and after 1500. At issue is not simply the original spillover event (the transfer of a pathogen from one host species to humans), but the question of how these diseases exploit human connectivity to proliferate. These early globalizing stories will be compared with the story of SARS-CoV-2 as its own "origin story" continues to unfold. Given current critiques of the failures of "global health," what do these origin stories have to tell us about how diseases become "endemic"? Is humankind both the cause of its major diseases, but also doomed to endure them in perpetuity?

Cigarettes are the world's leading cause of death--but how did we come into this world, where 6 trillion cigarettes are smoked every year? Here we explore the political, cultural, and technological origins of the cigarette and cigarette epidemic, using the tobacco industry's 80 million pages of secret documents. Topics include the history of cigarette advertising and cigarette design, the role of the tobacco industry in fomenting climate change denial, and questions raised by the testimony of experts in court.

Welcome! This is a new upper-level course in Gendered Innovations that explores how sex, gender, and intersectional analysis in research and design sparks discovery and innovation. This course focuses on sex and gender, and considers factors intersecting with sex and gender, including age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, educational background, disabilities, geographic location, etc., where relevant. We will read new research touching on basic concepts, intersectional design, gendering social robots, new approaches to sustainability, what's new in biomedicine & public health, facial recognition, inclusive crash test dummies, and more. As Director of Gendered Innovations, I work with the European Commission, Wellcome Trust, and major journals on policy to support integrating sex, gender, and intersectional analysis into the design of research. The operative question is: how can this type of analysis lead to discovery & innovation while enhancing social equity and environmental sustainability? Students will read and report on new research in weekly sessions and present a paper on a topic of their choice. We welcome open and respectful discussion. This course is open to upper-level undergraduate students by application https://forms.gle/2KmxUUnRSG2LNNSS6 and to graduate students. Limited to 15.

The slave trade, including the trans-Saharan, Indian Ocean, and trans-Atlantic trades, constituted nearly a millennium of interaction with the wider world and set in motion transformations in African societies, polities, and cultures. Topics include the debates about slavery in Africa, the impact of the slave trade on African societies, state formation, economic change, religious change, and household change in the period before the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century.