History

This is a course in an all-round way to review Chinese history from ancient times to the Qing Dynasty. The students will know the outline of ancient Chinese history and be interested in it. 

This course covers African American movements including CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality (1942), which concentrated on strategies such as sit-ins and picket lines; the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1957); the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement dedicated to put an end to segregation practices and offer alternate means to achieve somewhat similar ends: the transformation of American democratic institutions. It addresses the movement from litigation and nonviolent action to a more radical approach, and later from black power to black politics and the Black Lives Matter movement. The course also covers the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a multifaceted cultural movement which arose from the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Power movement. It included all the arts – music, literature, theater, dance, the visual arts – and relied on regional cultural infrastructure built after the major riots which erupted during the first half of the 1960s. It was embodied by African American artists and intellectuals, and deeply influenced American culture, in particular the relationship between popular culture and “high” culture, as well as other minority arts in the same period. The course looks at its history, its different forms, its sources and its heritage.

In a process of progressive construction of the knowledge, fields, sources and methods of the history of contemporary worlds, the introduction to the history of the 20th century constitutes an essential second stage. While the history of the 20th century is traditionally approached from the top, i.e. national and international institutions, democratic and totalitarian political regimes, and economic and social theories, and while it is primarily marked by the two world wars and the tensions of international economic crises, it must also be approached from the bottom, at the level of societies and individuals. The course studies the common experiences, cooperation, and exchanges that have developed in different areas over a long twentieth century.

This course encourages students to critically engage with key concepts and historiographical issues in the social and cultural history of the transitions from war to peace in the post-1918 and post-1945 period. It considers the complexity of French, British, German experiences of the transition from war to peace and the differences between the aftermaths of the First and Second World Wars. Students assess primary sources, particularly ego-documents such as letters and diaries, and interweave primary and secondary sources in arguments and discussions. 

The ‘Silk Roads’ are often considered to be the world’s greatest network of throughways that linked China to the Mediterranean world over land and sea. The historical development of Chinese culture and civilization cannot be scrutinized without a reflective understanding of the Chinese Empire’s dynamic interactions with the nomadic peoples and the Western world that were situated along the Silk Road. This course examines the geopolitical and cultural landscapes of Eurasia; the migration of peoples; as well as the spread of goods, religions, ideas, technologies, art and diseases between the East and the West. It explores the construction of an early form of globalization, and how it has contributed to the formation and dissolution of people’s ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural identities. This course ends by examining Chinese government’s grand initiative 'One Belt One Road', and inquiring about the way in which the geopolitics of the Silk Road region in the past still exerts tangible and long-lasting impact on the world today.

In the last twenty years the history of capitalism has been one of the most important themes in Global History. In this course, students are introduced to the key debates in this area. Students learn to differentiate capitalism from other kinds of economic organization, engage with the periodization for capitalism, and explore international trade and domestic institutions in the development of the modern economy. The central section of the course is taken up with the debates around consumption, slavery, and empire. Core reading in this section will include the classic Williams thesis, and its development in the literature on the relationship between cotton and chattel slavery in the group around Rockman and Beckert. The penultimate section addresses the history of finance capitalism, looking at the inflationary effects of silver supply from the Americas in the early period, the era of financial experimentation in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the eventual emergence of a recognizable world of international finance around the Gold Standard in the early 19th century. Students conclude with a consideration of Pomeranz's "Great Divergence" between Atlantic and Asian economies.

This course reviews and analyzes the main historical processes that shaped the United States from the Puritan Reformation that preceded the establishment of the 13 English colonies on the Atlantic coast until the Civil War (1861-1865).

The course will introduce Olympic movement and the related controversies and views from the perspective of culture In broad sense, analyze the relationship between Olympic culture and human and social development, politics, economy and world peace as well as the environmental protection. 

Course objectives It is intended that through the course students can learn and acquire the values and the positive character traits that are assumed to be developed in sport and Olympic Movement; to examine closely all aspects of the modern Olympic Games and Olympism in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of two key aspects of the Modern Olympic Culture: its historical developments and its present fundamental characteristics; the nature of the tensions created in the process of its evolution which have led to recent reforms.

This course provides a critical approach to the contemporary debate between three sub- disciplines dedicated to the study of the intellectual production of Latin America: the history of ideas, intellectual history, and decolonial studies. This course identifies, analyzes, and discusses the origins, theoretical-methodological foundations, discrepancies, and challenges of these three currents with a view to glimpsing possible routes for their own research projects.

This course studies the evolution of the population composition in Latin America and the Caribbean in recent decades, reflecting on the links between said demographic dynamics and some of the main economic, political, cultural and social transformations known in the region. This course takes a theoretical and methodological approach, considering the dependence between the size, structure and distribution of a population in interaction with socio-spatial transformations. It discusses demographic transition, aging, young people, the countryside-city relationship, urbanization, employment, territorial mobility, etc.