This course provides an overview of the major events, themes, and problems that characterized European history between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look critically at the wars, political and economic revolutions, and new intellectual developments that shaped Europe over this period: we will also examine how nation-building, imperial expansion, decolonization, division, and unity have marked its ideological and physical landscape.
- Teacher: Christina Carroll
This course follows the history of the Middle East from the late Ottoman period to the Arab Spring with a focus on the political, cultural, social, and intellectual changes that have occurred over the past 150 years. We will begin by following the ways in which political pressures from Europe and the spread of new ideas led to the transformation and breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We will then consider how European powers attempted to control and reshape the Middle East in the years following World War I and trace the formation of the new nation-states that emerged in that era. Finally, we will explore the contradictions and tensions that have continued to beset these nation-states in the contemporary period.
- Teacher: Christina Carroll