Distance Learning - Asynchronous
Dr. Alison Efford
Slavery and its legacies have warped democratic institutions in the United States, but resistance to them has brought some of America's greatest democratic triumphs. This class focuses on resistance to slavery, segregation, and discriminatory policing from the early 1600s to the present. Rather than provide an exhaustive survey it focuses on dramatic personal experiences and controversies of enduring significance.
HIST 1601-102: Difference and Democracy: Clashing Cultures in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Distance Learning - MWF 12:00-12:50
Dr. J. Patrick Mullins
In this course, we will engage with social systems and values by examining what happened when people from the diverse cultures of the Atlantic World came into contact with one another in the early modern era (1450-1820). This course considers the complex ways in which Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans met and clashed with one another on the Atlantic periphery, struggling over time to achieve peaceful coexistence despite social, ethnic, cultural, religious and political differences. Focusing on Eastern North America, students will use primary source documents and museum artifacts in discussion and research to explore how settlers, planters, natives, slaves, and imperial officials negotiated power through cultural adaptation, diplomacy, trade, captivity, intermarriage, conquest, enslavement, and empire. We will conclude this history of intercultural conflict with the fall of European empires and the Atlantic World's experiment with liberal democracy and human rights as a basis for managing human difference.
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HIST 1601-103: Difference and Democracy: Conflict and Capitalism: 1876-1936
TTh 11:00-12:15
Dr. David McDaniel
Beginning in the wake of the nation’s glorious Centennial Celebration, History 1601--Conflict and Capitalism, traces the development of large scale and often violent challenges to what many among the ranks of American farmers, immigrants, industrial laborers, women and racial minorities, perceived as the inequities, excesses, and basic inhumanity of industrial capitalism. Spanning sixty years, during which American industrial productivity expanded, along with its cities, at a mind-boggling pace, this course will consider the promise and especially the pitfalls of such untrammeled expansion and the resulting circumstances that led many to reconsider long held assumptions regarding a fabled land of equality and opportunity.
HIST 1601-104: Difference and Democracy: Conflict and Capitalism: 1876-1936
TTh 12:30-1:45
Dr. David McDaniel
Beginning in the wake of the nation’s glorious Centennial Celebration, History 1601--Conflict and Capitalism, traces the development of large scale and often violent challenges to what many among the ranks of American farmers, immigrants, industrial laborers, women and racial minorities, perceived as the inequities, excesses, and basic inhumanity of industrial capitalism. Spanning sixty years, during which American industrial productivity expanded, along with its cities, at a mind-boggling pace, this course will consider the promise and especially the pitfalls of such untrammeled expansion and the resulting circumstances that led many to reconsider long held assumptions regarding a fabled land of equality and opportunity.
HIST 1601-105: Engaging the World: The Promise of America Through Their Eyes
Dr. Kristen Foster
TTh 2:00-3:15
The United States is fast approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In recognition of this founding moment, we will spend the semester coming to terms with the document's promise through the eyes of the women and men who lived in its long shadow. While this document put natural rights at the front and center of the new nation's conversations about equality and belonging; the meaning of equality remained uncertain and contested in the decades that followed. In this dynamic ESSV classroom (reading, lecture, character studies, and lots of conversation), students will engage and interrogate the promises made at the nation's founding that "all men are created equal" and that each was endowed with "unalienable rights" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We will explore the stories of those Americans who were left in the shadows of equality and how they fought to make the Declaration's light shine on their lives as well.
HIST 1701-101: Engaging the World: Russian and Soviet Images of America
Distance Learning - MWF 10:00-10:50
Dr. Alan Ball
This course examines impressions formed of American life by Russian observers in the decades before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Their gaze included not just the American political and economic systems but also such topics as religion, racism, popular culture, sports and their commentaries will provide us an opportunity to compare conclusions about American ways expressed by Russian and Soviet visitors with widely differing points of view.
HIST 1701-102: Engaging the World: Understanding China Today
MWF 11:00-11:50
Dr. Daniel Meissner
In many ways, China today is a mirror image of the United States. Both nations have hyper-advanced societies, globally-dominant economics, powerful militaries, and international prominence. In other critical respects, however, they are reverse images of each other. Since its inception, the United States has championed participatory democracy, rule of law, inalienable rights, freedom of speech/press, and a free market economy, while the current Chinese government advocates One Party leadership, rule by law, statutory rights, controlled speech/press, and a planned economy. Differences of opinion on such fundamental issues as ideology, religion, justice, and human rights has bred misunderstanding and mistrust between the governments and citizens of the two nations.
HIST 1701-103: Engaging the World: Africa
Distance Learning - TTh 9:30-10:45
Dr. Chima Korieh
This course offers students a global perspective on the diversity of human history: the many ways that different peoples, societies, and cultures encountered one another in the making of the modern world. It examines selected topics with an emphasis on the ways peoples and select societies have encountered each other, and how these encounters created and integrated diverse kinds of knowledge about the "other". By examining these interactions and encounters between Africa and distinctive communities in specific times and places, we will become familiar with parts of the past that are seemingly foreign and remote and explore how they have shaped our knowledge and the world today. Overall, the course will push students to think about their place in the larger world in which they live and helps them to develop skills in critical thinking and effective problem-solving for engaging the world beyond their own immediate environment.
HIST 1701-104: Engaging the World: Christianity and Modernity
TTh 3:30-4:45
Fr. Michael Maher
This course will examine the underlying themes in cultural interaction and specifically the conflicts, adaptations, and meaningful conversations interactions that have occurred between Christianity and modernity.