2010-11 Catalog

Among the major events, trends, and problems of our country's history are the American Revolution, the framing and development of the Constitution, wars, slavery and emancipation, ethnic and gender relations, immigration, urbanization, westward conquest, economic fluctuations, changes in the sizes and functions of governments, foreign relations, class conflicts, domestic violence, and social and political movements. Although no one course can treat all of these themes, each freshman American history course will deal with two or more of them. How have American historians approached them? What arguments and evidence have scholars offered for their interpretations and how can we choose between them? In a word, what can we know about our heritage?

This course will be divided into three terms, each of which will focus on a coherent period in the history of European civilization. Each term is independent of the others, and students will normally take only one of the three terms. a. The Classical and Medieval Worlds. Will survey the evolution of Mediterranean and European civilization from antiquity through the end of the Middle Ages. It will emphasize the reading and discussion of primary sources, especially but not exclusively literary works, against the backdrop of the broad historical narrative of the periods. The readings will present students with the essential characteristics of various ancient and medieval societies and give students access to those societies' cultural assumptions and perceptions of change. Instructors: Archambeau, Brown, Clark. b. Early Modern Europe. Will survey the evolution of European civilization from the 14th century to the early 19th century. The topics covered will depend on the individual instructor, but they will include some of the major changes that transformed Western civilization in the early modern period, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the rise of sovereign states and the concomitant military revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and the French and industrial revolutions. Readings will include major works from the period, as well as studies by modern historians. Instructors: Brewer, Dennison, Gomez, M. Hunter. c. Modern Europe. Will introduce students to major aspects of the politics and culture of modernity that have profoundly transformed Western society and consciousness from the French Revolution to the contemporary era. A variety of historical, literary, and artistic works will be used to illuminate major social, intellectual, and cultural movements. The focus will be on significant and wide-ranging historical change (e.g., the industrial revolution, imperialism, socialism, fascism); on cultural innovation (e.g., modernism, impressionism, cubism); and on the work of significant thinkers. Instructors: Kormos-Buchwald, Rosenstone.

This course will be divided into three terms, each of which will focus on a particular aspect of pre-classical antiquity or premodern science. Each term is independent of the others, and students will normally take only one of the three terms. a. Before Greece: The Origins of Civilization in Mesopotamia. This course will introduce students to the early development of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt from 4000 B.C.E. through 1000 B.C.E. Origins of agriculture and writing, the evolution of the city, and the structures of the Mesopotamian economy and social order will be discussed. Comparison with contemporary developments in Egypt during the Old and Middle Kingdoms may include a reading of Gilgamesh from 3000 B.C.E. and of the Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe. The course concludes with a discussion of life during the late Bronze Age. Focus will be on life as it was lived and experienced by many groups in pre-classical antiquity rather than on kings and dynasties. Instructor: J. Buchwald. b. The Development of Science from Babylon through the Renaissance. Connections in antiquity between astrology and astronomy, early theories of light, Islamic science, new concepts of knowledge during the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, the early laboratory, the development of linear perspective, the origins of the Copernican and Keplerian systems of astronomy, and the science of Galileo. c. The Origins of Polytheism and Monotheism in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel and the Nature of Religious Belief. The civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia gave rise to complex forms of religious practices connected to the social order, moral behavior, and the afterlife. The course examines the origins of concepts of moral death and of sin as a violation of cosmic order in antiquity, the nature of polytheism, and the manner in which monotheism arose out of it. In addition to historical analyses the course includes readings by anthropologists who have studied cult structures as well as contemporary theories by evolutionary psychologists. Instructor: J. Buchwald.

Major topics include the following: What are the origins of modern Western science, when did it emerge as distinct from philosophy and other cultural and intellectual productions, and what are its distinguishing features? When and how did observation, experiment, quantification, and precision enter the practice of science? What were some of the major turning points in the history of science? What is the changing role of science and technology? Using primary and secondary sources, students will take up significant topics in the history of science, from ancient Greek science to the 20th- century revolution in physics, biology, and technology. Hum/H/HPS 10 may be taken for credit toward the additional 36-unit HSS requirement by HPS majors and minors who have already fulfilled their freshman humanities requirement and counts as a history course in satisfying the freshman humanities breadth requirement.

Reading in history and related subjects, done either in connection with the regular courses or independently, but under the direction of members of the department. A brief written report will usually be required. Graded pass/fail. Not available for credit toward humanities-social science requirement.

An individual program of directed reading in history, in areas not covered by regular courses.

Students will work with the instructor in the preparation of a research paper, which will form the basis of an oral examination.

This course is designed to introduce students to the formative period of Western medieval history, roughly from the fourth through the tenth centuries. It will emphasize the development of a new civilization from the fusion of Roman, Germanic, and Christian traditions, with a focus on the Frankish world. The course focuses on the reading, analysis, and discussion of primary sources.

This course is designed to introduce students to European history between 1000 and 1400. It will provide a topical as well as chronological examination of the economic, social, political, and religious evolution of western Europe during this period, with a focus on France, Italy, England, and Germany. The course emphasizes the reading, analysis, and discussion of primary sources.

This course examines the history and theory of collecting, concentrating on collectors, collections, and collecting in the West since the Renaissance. It will include field trips to collections around Los Angeles, including the Huntington Art Gallery and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and the examination of issues such as forgery and the workings of art markets.

Among theorists and practitioners of art, the "art world" has come to be seen as a central force in the production of contemporary art. But what is the art world? When and how did it come to assume this remarkable importance? Drawing on resources including social history, philosophical aesthetics, artists' writings and anthropological theory, this course will examine crucial moments in the formation and changing conception of the art world. Topics include the relation of art worlds to the valuation, collecting, and market for art; the ambivalent relations of the art world to artistic avant-gardes; and the comparative strength of the art world's position in the age of 21st-century globalization. Objects from local collections, and local collections themselves, will be central to the analysis. The course will include a number of field trips as well as presentations by contemporary artists.

This course examines the wide variety of family forms and household structures in past societies, as well as the social, cultural, institutional, and economic variables that influenced them. The course focuses mainly on Europe from about 1600 to the present, as this is the area for which most research has been done, but there will be some discussion of other parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Special attention is given to comparisons among different societies.

The course will focus each term on one kind of motion picture-either a film genre, or films made by an individual director, or from a single nation or region of the world or particular historical era. Included are weekly screenings, readings on film, a weekly discussion meeting, and a term paper.

This course will introduce students to some of the classic works of the science fiction film from the earliest days of cinema until the present. It will analyze aesthetic, historical, and social documents, and will show that such films, while describing alternative, hypothetical, and futurist worlds, also serve as a commentary upon and/or a critique of contemporary (to the film) historical, social, political, and ideological systems and attitudes.

The Russian intelligentsia registered the arrival of modern urban society with a highly articulate sensitivity, perhaps because these changes-industrialization, the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and social bonds, the questioning of traditional beliefs-came to Russia so suddenly. This gives their writings a paradigmatic quality; the modern dilemmas that still haunt us are made so eloquently explicit in them that they have served as models for succeeding generations of writers and social critics. This course explores these writings (in English translation) against the background of Russian society, focusing especially on particular works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.

This course examines the various configurations of race that developed within the Atlantic world in the early modern period. The "discovery" of the New World and the intensification of trade between Europe, Africa, and America opened up, first in Europe and later throughout the Atlantic space, a crucial debate about humankind, its nature, classification, and history. The conceptualization of race is a key issue in this context. Three analytical perspectives will be examined in turn. The first concerns the shift from the Medieval lineage categorization to the broad "physical" and "moral" classifications. The second is related to the entangled relations of gender and race, indebted to the Enlightenment's reflections on civilization. The third perspective is rooted in the multiplication of discourses about race and history at the end of the eighteenth century, when the authority of European philosophers diminished in the face of emerging American voices.

The development of the Supreme Court, its doctrines, personalities, and role in U.S. history through analyses of selected cases. The first half of the course, which is a prerequisite for the second half but may also be taken by itself, will deal with such topics as federalism, economic regulation, political rights, and free speech. The second half will cover such issues as the rights of the accused, equal protection, and privacy.

Selected topics in the development of the physical and biological sciences since the 17th century.

The course develops a framework for understanding the changing relations between science and religion in Western culture since antiquity. Focus will be on the ways in which the conceptual, personal, and social boundaries between the two domains have been reshaped over the centuries. Questions to be addressed include the extent to which a particular religious doctrine was more or less amenable to scientific work in a given period, how scientific activity carved an autonomous domain, and the roles played by scientific activity in the overall process of secularization.

This course uses a combination of lectures with hands-on laboratory work to bring out the methods, techniques, and knowledge that were involved in building and conducting historical experiments. We will connect our laboratory work with the debates and claims made by the original discoverers, asking such questions as how experimental facts have been connected to theories, how anomalies arise and are handled, and what sorts of conditions make historically for good data. Typical experiments might include investigations of refraction, laws of electric force, interference of polarized light, electromagnetic induction, or resonating circuits and electric waves. We will reconstruct instrumentation and experimental apparatus based on a close reading of original sources.

A study of the experimental, mathematical, and theoretical developments concerning light, from the time of Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D. to the production of electromagnetic optics in the 20th century.

This course examines the ways in which spectacle has been used in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe. Drawing on aesthetic writings about the impact of size and scale on audiences, but also examining historical accounts of the workings of spectacle on spectators, it looks at a number of case studies focusing on the technologies spectacles employed, the sites at which they were staged, the purposes and aims of their creators, and the controversies they engendered. Topics covered include English court masques, the rituals of absolute monarchy (especially those of Louis XIV), the changing presentation of plays and works of art, the public exhibition of torture, punishment, and human dissection, cabinets of curiosity and scientific demonstrations, religious, civic, and political ritual commemoration, the development of mixed media, panoramas and dioramas, and the staging of international exhibitions.

This course takes as its subject the intellectual, social, and institutional developments in medicine from the time of Hippocrates to modern disease theory. The specific historical periods covered will vary depending on the decision of the instructor, but topics may include early and late Greek medicine; medicine in the Mediterranean; healing and disease in the Middle Ages; the role of religion in medicine; medical professionalization; anatomy and surgery; botany, apothecaries, and merchants; illness and healing in the New World; medicine in the scientific revolution; modern Western medicine and the emergence of alternative medicine.

We read Cervantes's masterpiece, Don Quixote, with a view to some of the great upheavals that shaped the early modern world-from Europe's discovery of the Americas, to the demise of the feudal system and proliferation of indigent masses, to the rise of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, to the wars against heretics and infidels, and to the disastrous decline of the Hapsburg dynasty. Students are asked to consider the dynamics between truth and falsehood, history and fiction, that intervene in Cervantes's novelization of the moral and material dilemmas of his time.

This course aims at introducing students to problems, methods, and resources in European science during the era of Romanticism (c. 1780-1830). The Romantic movement embraced the sciences as well as literature, theology, and the arts, and sought to unite them into a comprehensive program of understanding nature based on experimentation and speculative philosophy. Scientists of the Romantic era have addressed fundemental concerns about scientific manipulations of nature that have, in a different form, resurfaced in the later part of the 20th century. Romanticism addresses major themes in the self-awareness of scientists and their perception in society, and it contributed to the emergence of new research fields and scientific institutions to accommodate nationalistic claims.