History

This course examines major events and cycles of Western culture. It identifies the various stages (synchronic perspective) that have constituted Western material culture and, broadly speaking, some historical epochs of Western civilization through its humanistic, religious, artistic, and scientific products. The course imparts the technical, symbolic, artistic, and religious keys (diachronic perspective) that determine the values of Western culture through the interpretation of certain cultural formations. It covers cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance to modernity, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The modern and contemporary history of China course is a compulsory course of ideological and political theory for undergraduates, provided by The Central Propaganda Department and the Ministry of Education .This course focus on the history of Chinese people against foreign aggression, fighting for national independence, overthrowing the reactionary rule and achieving national liberation in modern China. It will help students understand the national history, the historical process and internal rules of the modern Chinese society and the revolution. By this way, they will deeply understand why people choose the Marxism, the Communist Party of China and the road of socialism. This course was set up by Peking University since September 2006 and it was named to the quality courses of Beijing and China in 2008. Credit score: 2. schedule type: 2 hours a week, optional during two semesters. level: freshmen required. This course use the form of seminars as teachers will be separated into four teams, include presenters, a competent teacher, lectures and teaching assistants. The teachers will give you some lectures, and the traits of the course is the practical parts, such as broadcasting documentaries or films, writing exercises about the films, class discussion, visiting the exhibitions and so on. The assessment of students is flexible. Final exams accounts for 60%, which is open-book examination, the rest 40% include individual performance and essays. 

This course offers a critical introduction to United States history from the end of World War I to the present day. It is made up of four thematic sections which focus on: the state and political development; gender and sexuality; the US and the world; and race and ethnicity. The course focuses on historiographical questions that occupy scholars and interrogate change and continuity in political and social ideology during the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The course examines the peculiar nature of early modern English crime, law, and punishment through its recent historiography, testing arguments about social control, the use of evidence, levels of violence, and changing patterns of crime. From the level of state-building down to the pettiest transgressions, students will see the law in action and follow the people in court.

The course introduces students to some overarching questions associated with literary, artistic, and intellectual culture in medieval and Renaissance Italy, and will provide them with some of the linguistic and analytical tools and terminology for approaching literary and visual texts from these earlier periods. The course thus develops broader critical skills as well as prepares students for specific medieval and Renaissance cultural studies.

This course is a connected and comparative history of Asia before 1750 that introduces the region’s major political, economic, and intellectual contours prior to British colonization. The course focuses on tracing the history of premodern Asia through three types of transregional cultural formation: large empires, trading zones, and religious ecumene. The course explores and discusses how these formations unfolded across Central and Eastern Asia and South and Southeast Asia and uses them as a lens for thinking critically about the scope of Asia as a geographical, political, economic, and cultural category in premodern history.

This course examines people and cultures. Women and men, merchants and monks, Christians and Jews all formed the cultures, classes and statuses which constituted late medieval European society. The study themes of this course focus on the means by which ideas, cultures and expectations were constructed and transmitted, and include topics such as healthcare, civic life, the body, gender and sexuality, religious beliefs and practices, otherness, death, political theory, art and architecture, travel.

This course is an introduction to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Middle East from 1800- c.1950. Opening at the beginning of the 19th century it examines the program of reform and state-building of the Ottoman Empire to defend itself against the growing military and economic power of Europe. The course then goes on to address the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I, the post-1919 settlement and the rise of nationalism in the interwar period, and ends with the establishment of Israel in 1948.

The course demonstrates the reasons for the collapse of the communist system in the Soviet Union and its consequences, with a specific focus on Russia and the Baltic states; the geopolitical consequences of the demise of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent reordering of global economic and geopolitical space; the nature of socio-economic changes in the region in the 1990s, and how different social groups responded to them; cultural change, with a focus on identity politics, gender and ethnicity; the political management of ethno-culturally diverse territories, and the renegotiation of national and ethnic identities; and the importance of the region for Europe as a whole, including a focus on Russia and the Baltic states' relations with the new enlarged Europe.