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. 

Until 1918, empire was the most common form of rule and political organization. This lecture course focuses on England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the Empire these peoples generated after c.1600, and uses this as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of empire more broadly. How and how far did this small set of islands establish global predominance and when did this fail? What roles did war, race, religion, economics, culture and migration play in these processes? And how far do the great powers of today retain characteristics of empire?

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about subjectivity, the nature of society, the forms and purpose of politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe within the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of intellectual movements--Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, existentialism, structuralism, and postmodernism--examining how European thinkers responded to the historical events happening around them.

History of Eastern Europe from 1800 to the present. In this course, we analyze the concept of and historical trajectories of Eastern Europe during the modern era. The focus is upon political history, but we will also discuss how modern politics affected culture and the arts. Themes and topics include (but not limited to): empire, statehood and nationalism in East-European history; Marxism, radicalism, fascism, communism; the revolutions of 1848, 1917, 1989, and 2014. The class ends with discussion of the wars on the Balkans during the 1990s, the crisis in today's Ukraine, and the historical roots for both.

How did the United States emerge as a revolutionary republic built on the principle of human equality at the same time that it produced the wealthiest and mightiest slave society on earth? This course approaches that question in an interpretive history emphasizing the contradictory expansion of racial slavery and political democracy. Topics include the place of slavery in the Federal Constitution and the founding the nation, the spread of the cotton kingdom, Jacksonian democracy and the growth of political parties, the rise of antislavery and proslavery politics, and the growing social and political divisions between North and South.

Beliefs about the nature of the universe, the Earth, and even the human body changed drastically during the early modern period. This course examines this transformation of natural knowledge as a process of both social and intellectual reorganization. Explores how Europeans developed a new mechanistic science for astronomy, physics, and medicine with a dynamic culture of new institutions and technologies. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An examination of the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire. Topics include: the invention and unfolding of single-party revolutionary politics, the expansion of the machinery of state, the onset and development of Stalin's personal despotism, the violent attempt to create a noncapitalist society, the experiences and consequences of the monumental war with Nazi Germany, and the various postwar reforms. Special attention paid to the dynamics of the new socialist society, the connection between the power of the state and everyday life, global communism, and the 1991 collapse.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.