Global Arc

This class views legal history broadly as the relationship between formal law, popular legal culture, state governance, and social change in the U.S., from the colonial period to the present. We will examine changing conceptions of rights, equality, justice, the public interest. We also will consider questions about the operation of law in U.S. history: How is law made? What do people expect from law? Who controls law? How did that change over time? These questions open up a rich, layered past in which the law was a source of authority that mediated social and political conflicts, even as those conflicts ultimately changed the law.

The relations between the United States and other nations from 1776 to the present, treating political, economic, and military aspects of U.S. foreign affairs, with special attention to the art of diplomacy. Two lectures, one precept.

The history of modern America, with particular focus on domestic political and social changes. Topics include the Roaring 20s; the Great Depression and the New Deal; the homefront of World War II and the Cold War; the civil rights movement and the Great Society; the Vietnam War; the sexual revolutions; the Silent Majority, the Nixon administration, and Watergate. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An examination of changing patterns of manhood and womanhood, with an emphasis on women's experience. Topics include housekeeping, child rearing, birth control, sexuality, work, feminism, and the role of gender in religious and political movements and economic development. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

From colonial settlement to the present, this course weaves a comprehensive history of American cities. Over centuries, cities have symbolized democratic ideals of "melting pots" and innovation, as well as crises of disorder, decline, crime, and poverty. Urban life has concentrated extremes like rich and poor; racial and ethnic divides; philanthropy and greed; skyscrapers and parks; violence and hope; downtown and suburb. The course examines how cities in U.S. history have brokered revolution, transformation and renewal, focusing on class, race, gender, immigration, capitalism, and the built environment. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

This course will serve as an intensive historical survey on the rise of mass popular culture and entertainment from roughly 1800 to 1980 and will investigate the ways multiethnic American popular culture (photography, rock 'n' roll, jazz, sports, film, radio, and other forms of multimedia and expressive culture) was influenced by and shaped the American political landscape, race relations, labor, gender, sexuality, technology, and urbanization. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

In our contemporary world, science, technology, and medicine enjoy tremendous cultural and intellectual authority. This class introduces a set of analytical tools historians use to understand the origins and consequences of these ways of knowing, across space and time. We will discuss a variety of ideas and methods that describe the social, cultural, and intellectual conditions of possibility for creating knowledge about the natural world. In addition, the class materials invite students to reflect on the cultural and intellectual constraints that shape how societies determine which knowledge is worth pursuing and why.

More science has been done since 1970 than in the history of the world before that date--- combined. This course traces a series of developments in contemporary science across a broad array of disciplines, with the goal of illuminating the historical processes that have brought them about and providing students with a set of tools to understand the particular position of the sciences in today's world. Topics covered include AIDS, nuclear power, string theory, evolutionary psychology, brain drain, and genomics.

By interweaving intellectual and cultural threads, this course covers the history of evolutionary theory from Charles Darwin, and the scholars on whom he drew, to the late 20th century. We explore how biologists invested in evolutionary theory the capacity to explain our all too human nature and perhaps, therefore, to help us solve some of the world's most pressing problems. We also discuss how and why critics have attacked evolution as amoral and socially dangerous. In doing so, we investigate how scientists have negotiated the dynamic relationship between professional and public science.

From "Chinese opium" to Oxycontin, and from cocaine and "crack" to BiDil, drug controversies reflect enduring debates about the role of medicine, the law, the policing of ethnic identity, and racial difference. This course explores the history of controversial substances (prescription medicines, over-the-counter products, black market substances, psychoactive drugs), and how, from cigarettes to alcohol and opium, they become vehicles for heated debates over immigration, identity, cultural and biological difference, criminal character, the line between legality and illegality, and the boundaries of the normal and the pathological.