Course Description
Democratic Revolutions in Europe explores the uneven history of democracy in modern Europe. Almost two hundred years after French revolutionaries celebrated the victory of liberty and democracy, Europeans still struggled to free themselves from authoritarian rule. From the French Revolution to the European Union, midshipmen will investigate how Europeans supported democratic reforms and resisted efforts to restrict liberty.
They will also examine how authoritarian regimes, from the Napoleonic Empire to the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic, used the institutions of democracy to justify the exclusion of the people from political power. We will analyze democratic institutions, revolutions, and political movements in order to understand the development of democracy in modern Europe. Finally, we will consider what the history of European democracy can teach us about future of democracy in the twenty-first century.
Course Description
Students will conduct an exploration of early 20th Century American historiography, construct a comparative analysis between populist movements in the first half of the century and today, exercise examining current events in a historical perspective, and effectively deliver multiple written argumentative essays throughout the semester.
Course Description
To understand American social and cultural history we will use the lens of the nation's various utopian experiments. We open our study with the Colonial Era when the Puritans attempted to create a City on a Hill and end with the years following the Vietnam War when society began to come to terms with inequalities still present in our society through a number of communes and planned communities. Along the way we'll investigate race and ethnicity, religion, class, gender, as well as sex and sexuality. If you think the study of American history is only about memorizing dates – you're in for a surprise.
Course Description
In American Maritime History, we will be considering how the United States has been shaped by the sea from 1600 to the present. You know the naval aspects of American sea power; now it's time to think about the other parts of sea power, such as maritime economy, maritime culture, and maritime governance. We'll be looking at fishing, whaling, commerce, diplomacy, environment, demographics, containerization, and more. We may even sing a few shanties (or at least listen to them).
Course Description
Examines the evolution of the American South from the colonial era to the present with specific focus on the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement. Concludes with an analysis of history, heritage and memory.
Course Description
This course explores the modern history of the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, with all its twists and turns, and with a particular focus on Syria -- a country which was once described as 'the beating heart of Arab nationalism' but which has recently descended into civil war and became the theater of a regional conflict.
Course Description
This course engages midshipmen to explore the salient aspects of Chinese history from the time of Confucius and Sun Zi (Sun Tsu) to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the last imperial dynasty in 1912. It attempts to explain the historical roots of the modern rise and traces the cultural, intellectual, and military evolution of Chinese society from the Warring States, through Pax Sinica of Han and Tang, to the mighty yet fragile Ming and Qing empires of the recent centuries.
Course Description
Major themes of Modern Chinese History are CHANGE and TRANSFORMATION. This course covers China's nearly three hundred years' developments up to the present days including the last imperial Qing dynasty (the 17th century to 1912), the Republic of China (1912-1949), Communist state under Mao Zedong (1949-1976), and China under economic reforms (1979-present). Issues addressed involve political and military institutions, cultural traditions, Western impact, wars and conflicts, economic development, education system, and China's role in international affairs.
Course Description
This course traces the rise of a superpower that is communist China since 1949, explains the cultural, intellectual and ideological forces that animate the Chinese Communist Party and its global vision. It seeks to demonstrate how the risen China impacts Chinese society, the global power balance, geopolitical and geostrategic posturing, international relations, and Sino-U.S. military and technological rivalry.
Course Description
Ever since the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 American policymakers are trying to understand strategic mistakes in the field or identify lessons for balancing the appetite for political and military commitments of war or reassessing the deep-seated corruption sowed by nation-building activities.
The course will examine the historic struggles and the changing nature of political authority as well as how past civil wars and conflicts have shaped and redefined regional, cultural, and political differences among diverse ethnic and tribal groups.
Course Description
For thousands of years, the Indian Ocean represented a coherent and vibrant nexus of trade and communication linking Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Such connections facilitated the spread and circulation of peoples, ideas, beliefs, technologies, and commodities across a vast oceanic domain. Independence from European colonial rule brought to power a series of indigenous nationalist elites in the second half of the 20th century who very often held sharply contrasting views about what sort of society ought to emerge from the ruins of empire. Each new state faced remarkable challenges, including how to address poverty, illiteracy, "backwardness", inequality, neo-colonialism, and seemingly intractable social divisions.
Some states responded to these challenges by launching what they regarded as revolutionary assaults on perceived forms of oppression, exploitation, and underdevelopment. By the late-1970s, ten states fringing the Indian Ocean adopted socialism as their ruling creed. Yet by the mid-1990s all but one had abandoned socialism in favor of more liberal approaches to governance. In this course, we will examine several of these revolutionary experiments--the modernist ideas that animated them, the innovations they introduced, and their impact on the lives of millions of ordinary people.
While in recent years the Indian Ocean has emerged as a major topic of historical research, historians have given relatively scant attention to the post-independence era, and are still in search of common, unifying themes. Yet one very obvious one is "development", or in other words the series of highly ambitious projects undertaken by post-colonial regimes across the Indian Ocean to "catch up" with the West. Indeed, it is impossible to understand this region's postcolonial history without asking the question of how locals have variously conceptualized and pursued progress, development, and 'modernization.'
Course Description
U.S. global diplomacy involves complex multilateral efforts to pursue national interests to sustain security, enhance global economic ties, and support political groups which desire a transition to democracy. With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, experts claimed that the U.S. was uniquely positioned to actively use its diplomacy to directly support civil society organizations that would produce 'global citizens' who ushered in democratic principles of governance.
Using case studies, the course examines assumptions about global diplomacy and civil society, and the practical limitations of the role of civil society organizations.
Course Description
What does it mean to be religious? Why do all societies seem to have religion? Is religion only a modern western concept? This course offers a critical introduction to the modern, secular, academic study of religion—myth and ritual, sacred and profane, pure and impure, relics and sacred objects, territory, scripture, and the violent origins of society.
Course Description
Thanks to how ubiquitous the internet and computers have become in the late-20th and early-21st century, more people than ever are now able to access, discover, create, and share historical knowledge. However, this deeply interconnected world offers both grand promise and grave peril for citizens and academics alike.
With an eye towards building digital literacy, students in this course will familiarize themselves with some of the digital tools of a modern historian from Google Ngram and GIS to podcasts and YouTube. Further, class discussions will revolve around the ongoing challenges faced by increasing digitization in the public realm and academic disciplines. Students will reflect upon and debate issues on copyright law, legitimacy, privacy, and the now-infamous "algorithm".
Course Description
From their earliest days, humans have pursued a culture of improvement - the belief that things could be done in a better way - with regard to the material world and its employment in response to their needs and dreams. The History of Technology in Peace and War examines the social processes, rooted within cultures, which have shaped technological development and evolution within Western and worldwide culture over the past millennium, from farming to modern warfare. Students will learn the different models that historians employ to study technological change and the effects technological choices, rooted in cultural and societal values, have had on the human experience.
Course Description
Warfare in the Age of Sail examines the history of warfare on sea and land, both in Europe and European colonies, from the dawn of European expansion through the era of Napoleon. Tactical, logistical, technological, and professional developments of Western navies and armies are studied in their political, economic, social, and cultural contexts.
The course particularly explores the fundamental questions: What role did Western weapons and warfare, both on land and at sea, play in the development of Europe's various maritime empires and Europe's eventual global dominance? Why did certain states come to dominate regionally and globally? How and why were professional militaries and navies created?
Course Description
This course is a history of the United States Marine Corps from its founding in 1775 until the twenty-first century. Its purpose is to familiarize students with a basic narrative concerning the growth and development of the Marine Corps over time. Like the Army and Navy, the growth of the Marine Corps has coincided with the growth of American economic, military, and naval power. We will discuss how this peculiar amalgam of traditions and jurisdictions has affected the Marine mission, identity, culture, and history.
The Marine Corps is a warfighting institution. Therefore, attention will be devoted to its history of combat operations across the breadth of the United States' military and naval history. It's development from ships guard's and naval landing parties to the modern-day Fleet Marine Force is a complicated and complex evolutionary process. Much of that evolution was informed by the conflicts that the Marines fought at home and abroad.
Course Description
This course is a limited chronicle of the United States during its formative years, 1789-1828. It begins with a discussion of the results of the Constitutional Convention in 1787; traces the problems faced by the new federal government, including precedents, finances, expansion, ideological and social cleavages, foreign intrigue, war and naval development during the Quasi War, Barbary War, and War of 1812, and its emergence thereafter as a truly independent nation with a seagoing navy.
Course Description
Over the course of centuries, naval strategy and professionalism has developed through the active and intellectual writings and engagement of officers and civilian maritime leaders. Including subjects such as strategy, leadership, policy, and professional conduct, the intellectual history of navies in general and the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in particular have been expressed through professional and historical writing. This activity accelerated at the close of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.
The development of a "naval mind" requires an understanding of this history of naval thought and maritime intellectualism. This course will study the development of that naval strategy and thought. It is particularly focused on the long 20th century as a period of intellectual development for the U.S. sea services and world naval understanding. This course is not designed as a program to "teach you what to think" about the past and present of strategy and the naval profession. Instead, by reading and discussing the naval professional writing of the past the goal is for you to begin synthesizing it to do your own thinking about the services you will be joining.
Course Description
This course will investigate the U.S. Navy's complicated and largely-forgotten relationship with slavery from the American Revolution through Reconstruction. The navy found itself reining in slavery's worst excesses while facilitating its spread, and offering freedom to some African Americans while actively hunting down and re-enslaving others.
To understand this conflicted story, we'll trace a saga of piracy, secret proslavery exploring expeditions, African military interventions, pursuits of illegal invasions of Latin America, and decades of cat and mouse slave traders. We'll examine reasons why officers broke from their closest friends and country to join a Southern rebellion, the Union Navy's role as a liberating force in the Civil War, and the surprising but short-lived attempt to make the service truly inclusive in its aftermath. In the process, we will explore race, law, culture, science, and war in the most divisive era of American history, and students will learn about the legacy of slavery in America and the context behind today's debates about who should be memorialized on the navy's buildings and ships.
Course Description
Insurgency and counterinsurgency are hardly new phenomena. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of the history, theory and doctrine of irregular warfare, with a focus on modern counterinsurgency warfare. The course will also explore factors that have influenced U. S. irregular warfare success/ failure as well as introducing the concept of a globalized insurgency to prepare students for the challenges of dealing with emergent non-state entities.
Course Description
This course introduces Midshipmen to a broader history of what we call 'Hinduism', but what Indians themselves call sanatana dharma (the timeless 'duty'/'order'). Gandhian non-violence has long cast a shadow over western understandings of Hinduism, and this course explores the early development of Hinduism 4,000 years ago and how notions of henotheism, ontology, dharma, karma and ritual have evolved over time. It emphasizes the tensions between renouncing/non-violence and householders/violence in daily life, and how debates about violence permeate the traditions that worship Shiva and Vishnu. The course ends by exploring how Hindu views of their identity have changed with India's encounter with Muslim and later British rule.
Course Description
HH462 introduces students to the historical literature, historiography, concerning the Holocaust: the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. Topics to be covered in this course will include the origins of anti-semitism, the development of Nazi policy toward the Jews and other targeted groups after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, the design and carrying out of the 'Final Solution', Jewish responses to Nazi persecution, the role of 'bystander' populations, gender issues in the study of the Holocaust, the responses of other governments to Nazi policy, and the issue of Holocaust memory and its construction, as well as Holocaust denial.
