The course has two goals: to provide a general introduction to European History in the period from 1815 to 1990 and at the same time to examine a number of especially important developments in greater depth. The first half of the course will range in time from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The following issues will be emphasized: the rise of conservative, liberal and socialist thought; the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Great Britain; the revolutions of 1848; Bismarck and the Unification of Germany; European imperialism; and the origins of World War I. The second half of the course will stress the following problems: World War I; the Russian Revolution and the emergence of Soviet Russia; the Versailles Treaty; the Great Depression; the rise of fascism, especially Nazism; the Holocaust; the emergence of a new Europe with the "European Community"; the Cold War; the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; and the reunification of Germany.

Japan in the mid-19^th century was beleaguered by British and American imperialism and rocked by domestic turmoil. How, then, did it emerge to become one of the world's leading imperialist powers by the start of the 20^th century? And why did the horrible destruction and demoralization Japan experienced after World War II ultimately result in rapid economic growth and renewed superpower status for Japan after the 1950s? These questions provide the framework for our study of modern Japanese history. Throughout the course, we will focus special attention on Japan's distinctive urban culture, the changing role of women in Japanese society, the re-invention of Japan's imperial institution, the domestic and international effects of Japanese imperialism, and the question of America's role in Japan's post-war reconstruction. Readings of drama, fiction, satire, and memoir will contribute to our exploration of these and other topics. No prior study of Japan is necessary; first-year students are welcome.

Nietzschean superman, or a tyrant of Hitlerian proportions. Questions will be raised throughout regarding the recoverability of historical facts and the cultural/psychological impulses that govern how history is reconstructed as myth and fiction.

Focusing on the labors of women in the experience of the U.S., this course explores several historical themes--the "proper" locus for the study of work (home? community? factory? office?); women's work culture; the feminization of certain types of work and the implications of this for wages, promotion opportunities, and general working conditions; women as labor activists and organizers; the relationship between work and leisure for women; women's participation rates in the formal economy; the masculinization of work; class, race, and ethnic differences among women as workers; and the ways in which women's labor history necessitates a revision of the general national labor history narrative. From this roster of topics, it should be clear that this is not a traditional "labor history course" in that our point of departure is not limited to or mainly formal union history and the place of women within that history. The course is comprehensive in its chronological focus, covering the colonial period through the late twentieth century.

The French eighteenth century set itself the ambitious and optimistic task of ordering all human knowledge. We continue to live with its ambiguous legacies of universalistic and categorical thinking. This course is an exploration of one of the enlightenment's great texts, Diderot's Encyclopédie, a compendium of articles by the most famous thinkers of the age as well as a succession of hack writers. It was designed to fight the good philosophical fight against retrograde institutions and their monopolies on human and metaphysical knowledge. It aimed to make possible -for a price- the progress of the exercise of human reason through the spread of knowledge. This course will be organized around well- and lesser-known articles from the Encyclopedia to explore enlightened notions of power, truth, social organization and difference, science, sex, gender, magic, religion... What were the content and mechanisms of enlightenment autocritique? Did the unreasonable, ineffable, sublime, and inexplicable escape the map of words and things; or were they absorbed into enlightenment logics? Sessions will be organized around articles from the Encyclopedia with readings by Robert Darnton, Michel Foucault, and their critics to lend our semester's work historical and critical grounding. No prior knowledge of French history or language necessary, although students are invited to read any assigned text in the original.

HIV and the syndrome it causes, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), have become one of the most pressing global health issues since its emergence and classification in the early 1980s. Like other great human plagues (smallpox, influenza, plague), HIV is a socio-cultural as well as scientific-medical phenomenon. This course examines the cultural and social discourses that have arisen in response to the AIDS crisis and the varied and complex responses to the threat of HIV. The socio-geographical foci for this course are North American Gay communities and Africa. We shall look at the mystery of the emergence and eventual discovery of HIV, the disease in various media (literature, visual media, essays, and policy), and responses to the virus and its threat to public health through critique, protest (ACT-UP), and writing. The course seeks to explore the social and cultural meanings of contagion and containment, identity and politics, within the spectre of HIV disease.

The Scientific Revolution wrought a dramatic shift of thought about the universe. It also challenged traditional views about religion, society, and nature. We will examine how and why science changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then consider its social impact, focusing on concepts of nature and gender, the conflict between Galileo and the church, and the place of science in society.

We are aware of the dramatic power of the state to make war and dispense punishment. Too often neglected is the story of the state's emergence as the primary agent of conciliation between individuals and groups within and beyond its borders. In this capacity, its power has increased in manifold ways. Here, the executive power of pardon and the criminalization of the duel are examples within the domestic context. Internationally, the rise of diplomatic institutions featuring negotiations in the name of the state paralleled internal developments. Although dueling pens would replace dueling swords, insult -the word- would remain one of the greatest forms of injury. Perhaps as a result, political and social theorists would redouble their concern with the power of language. What entities preceded the state in the task of calming discord? What new and old entities (the Republic of Letters and the Church, for example) would come to compete with its authority to establish mutual understanding and cooperation? Together they fashioned a modernity founded upon belief in the possibilities of negotiation through the power of reason and facilitated by the use of new communications technologies. Yet, to rectify the ills of social and political dissension, the state and its competitors often created new divisions and ossified old ones between nations and among its own people. Our work of the semester will be to place early modern ideas on peace, sovereignty, international protocols, sociabilité, and civilité within a cultural framework. Readings from Machiavelli, Bodin, Plessis-Mornay, Catherine de Medici, Richelieu, Grotius, Lipsius, Abbé de St. Pierre, Émilie du Chatelet, Montesquieu, and a variety of entertaining diplomatic treatises and manuals. Students should be prepared to read closely and analytically a variety of literary and historical texts.

See Anthropology section for description.

Targeting mainly the decade from 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) to 1964 (Civil Rights Act), this course will survey the struggle for African-American civil rights in the years following World War II and culminating in 1968 with the death of Martin Luther King, the ascendancy of black nationalism, and the institutionalization of civil rights gains in the second Johnson administration. The course will explore the following themes: precedents for the Movement in earlier labor, peace, and socialist lobbies; the early Movement focus on legal and constitutional redress; the infrastructure for the Movement in pre-existing black community institution; the radicalization of the Movement; and the role the Movement played in instigating later, separate protest movements. While this course is open to all students, a strong preference will be given to moderated students and/or students with prior course work in this period.

In the very short period between 1929 and 1945, American society passed through two of the most severe crises in its history, the Great Depression and World War II. The first crisis was one of fairly sudden, and desperately widespread, unemployment; the second crisis, on the domestic front, involved unprecedented industrial production and demand for workers (and soldiers). This course explores how the various subgroups of American society passed through these years of crisis and were permanently changed by them - subgroups defined especially by the fault lines of ethnicity and race, social class, gender and region. Also, we focus on state and society: how the federal government's relation to domestic social issues shifted forever in these crises - first in FDR's New Deal, then in the coordination of production for "the great arsenal of democracy," and finally in drafting an enormous military force and adjusting the home front accordingly.