The intellectual exchange between various ancient cultures was by far more significant than it is usually assumed. This is particularly true in respect to cosmography, both mythical and scientific. There were a number of quite specific ideas common to the classical world, Mesopotamia, India, and China. One can list among such ideas that of a World Mountain, that of a stream surrounding the world, that of the so called Great Year (a cycle of periodic destructions and generations of the world); many texts written in various ancient languages present the initial stage of the universe as a formless mass, etc. Such common or similar ideas will be discussed in the course, their origins will be traced or suggested. It will be shown that the intellectual exchange in antiquity was by no means one-way traffic. The Near Eastern influence upon the Greeks was quite palpable at the formative stage of Greek civilization. However, as soon as Greek science and philosophy emerged they became themselves major contributers to the world-wide intellectual development, and their influence can be traced as far east as China. The comparative approach will also illuminate individual character of various ancient cultures in which similar ideas functioned in different contexts. The problem of the intellectual revolutions of the first millennium BC (the so-called "Achsenzeit") will be also addressed. The reading will include sections of major classical works (the "Iliad", Hesiod's "Works and Days", Plato's "Timaeus", the "Epic of Gilgamesh", the "Mahabharata", the "Tao-te Ching", the "Huai-nan Tzu") as well as some technical treatises and the fragments of Presocratic philosophers, all available in English translations. Two relatively short papers are expected from the participants.

This course will examine the irony of increasing political dissent and violence in an era of relative peace and prosperity. It will touch on such topics as civil rights, media and politics, narcissism, the Cuban missile crisis, youth alienation, popular culture, the feminist movement, and Watergate. It will take an in-depth look at the three presidents who left their mark on the era--John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon--as well as the most disruptive crisis of the post-war years, the Vietnam War.

A semester-long survey will explore Russian history from Peter the Great to the 1917 revolution in a broad context of modernization and its impact on the country. Among the topics of special interest are: reforms of Peter the Great and their effects; the growth of Russian absolutism; the position of peasants and workers; the rift between the monarchy and educated society; the Russian revolutionary movement and Russian Marxism; the overthrow of the Russian autocracy. The readings will include contemporary studies on Russian history and works by nineteenth-century Russian writers.

In October, 1949, Mao Zedong stood at Tiananmen Square and proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China. Nearly forty years later, Chinese students and urban workers occupied the same square, calling for democracy and new economic opportunities. What caused progressive Chinese to turn their backs on China's radical experiment with state socialism? Where is China headed as it dismantles socialism and plunges into the twenty-first century? These questions will guide us as we use fiction, film, photographs, speeches, government documents, and memoir accounts to explore China's history during the last half century. Other central topics will include the reasons for the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, China's emerging popular culture, and its looming environmental crisis. No prior study of Chinese history is necessary for this class.

The Modern Era began with one of the three worst disasters in environmental history: the Dust Bowl. Ever since a debate has raged between the apostles of growth and the prophets of ecological doom. The publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring gave voice to the contemporary environmental movement. The crisis to which Carson responded had its origins in industrial and agricultural technologies adopted during and after World War II. Its deeper roots lay in the widely held Western assumption that "humans can improve on nature." That assumption has had its epiphany in Disney World. It has been opposed by the environmental movement Carson inspired. Ecology, "the subversive science" has provided the substantive basis for the environmentalist agenda. This course will examine the on-going debate over the environment and its impact on public policy.

Mbaye Cham, African film historian, states: "Compared to most of their Western counterparts who tend to wield little influence and pressure on the power process, many contemporary African filmmakers participate actively in the affairs of society at all levels and are more overtly committed to the challenges of social and political reconstruction and renewal." This class continues the debate on the use of popular culture by examining social and historical contexts of African society. African filmmakers such as Sembene Ousmane, Djibril Diop Mambety, Flores Gomes, Jean-Marie Teno, and Cheick Oumar Sissoko intrinsically write social history - or the everyday experiences of ordinary people- as they affirm the complexity and humanity of African life. The films in the class will ground class discussion around colonial and post-colonial experiences in African history. We will explore themes such as colonialism, religious expression, nationalism, gender, the role of the intellectual in post-colonial society, censorship, and government corruption. Another central text of the course will be George B. N. Ayittey's Africa Betrayed.

Black women's thought has remained hidden from the mainstream history of ideas, willfully sequestered in diaries, private correspondence, and the minutes of semi-private organizations or carelessly excluded by formal institutions. There exists an intellectual tradition of Afro-American women that is as rich and diverse as the experiences that helped to shape it. This seminar will focus on ideas about slavery, race, color, anger, class, work (especially domestic service), suffrage, resistance, gender and sexuality, marriage, motherhood, charity, religion and spirituality, Africa (imagined), and escape. In the first part of the course we will read essayists, such as . Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Patricia Hill Collins, who write about Black women and explicitly draw on pre-existing traditions. Their methodologies will help to guide through a sensitive and pointed exploration of the primary sources that will be the focus of the second part of the seminar. Students will work chronologically from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century, always across the disciplines , using letters, fiction, institutional documents, music, art, and film to get at this subject, which by definition does not exist.

An close reading of Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown and Middletown in Transition. The first volume was based on the work of a research team that lived for months in the 'typical' American community of Middletown in the 1920s, the second volume was based on a similar, second study during the crisis of the Great Depression. The volumes try to understand all that is interesting in the social life the community -- notably class structure and class relations; politics; courtship, family, childraising and schooling; entertainment, religion and other aspects of cultural life. These volumes have proven very durable, both in serving as a modal that other community studies must confront and in providing an understanding of American society and culture in the twenties and thirties. Students will write a term paper based on this and other American community studies or on some aspect of America in the twenties and thirties highlighted by the Lynds' work. Enrollment limited to 12.

The years from 1789 to 1815 span the years from the adoption of the U.S. Constitution through the end of the War of 1812. This early national period was a tenuous one for the new nation as it struggled to achieve an organic level of cohesion and national identity beyond a basic rejection of British colonial rule. Persistent localized identities, divided political visions -- Federalist and Democratic-Republican, and international threats against U.S. sovereignty all jeopardized the viability of the political experiment, but by the period's end, a national cultural and political solidarity was realized. This course examines the period as one of transition for the nation, but trains its eye on the Hudson Valley as a regional case study. Students will be expected to use the archival records at Montgomery Place in Annandale and Clermont in Germantown, estates held by the Livingston family, to develop research papers dealing with such pertinent topics as class conflict between tenant farmers and estate owners, the role of women in the new republic, the decline of slaveholding in New York State, and U.S.-French relations.

What are the origins of history as a modern discipline? How have particular modes of history developed in relation to nationalism, imperialism, and the emergence of the modern state? How have modern historical techniques served to produce ideology? Moreover, how has history provided a tool for unmasking and challenging different forms of domination and the ideologies that help to perpetuate them? This course will address these questions through theoretical readings that offer diverse perspectives on the role of narrative in history, the historian's relation to the past, and the construction of historiographical discourses. Other readings will critically assess the powerful role that historical narrative has played in the processes of imperialism and nation building, as well as in class and gender politics. Some of the writers to be discussed will be Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Michel Foucault, Joan Wallach Scott, and theorists active in the Subaltern Studies movement. In addition to our common readings, students will write a research paper that analyzes a historical text or a historiographical debate using one of the critical perspectives we have discussed during the semester. Students who have moderated in history are particularly welcome.