Silicon Valley seeks to remake the future. This course focuses on its past. Students explore the history of American technology, capitalism, and power that created Silicon Valley, and reflect on how its rise has shaped U.S. labor, leisure, and values. Discussions include: education in an age of A.I.; the military-industrial roots of Big Tech; the dot-com bubble; techno-utopias and transhumanism; the gig economy and labor precarity; venture capital and crypto; social media and the attention economy; the religious dimensions of techno-optimism; the rise of alt-right tech bros; and what A.I.

Examines the longevity of the U.S. Civil War in historical memory, as a pivotal period in the development of American racism and African American activism. Explores cutting-edge histories, primary source materials, documentaries, popular films, and visual and political culture. Explores the Civil War as a mass slave insurrection and studies the myriad meanings of Emancipation. Looks at the impact of slavery on race and racism on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Enrollment limited to 40.

This course provides an introductory survey of African history from the nineteenth century to approximately World War II. In doing so, it provides a political, social, and economic history of the continent framed around the experiences of the continent’s peoples. Throughout the course, students ask the structural questions of what role slavery, abolition, colonialism, global industrialization, and capitalism played in shaping the continent’s past.

Previously HST 249. A survey of the ancien régime. On behalf of the central State, war-making absolutists, Enlightened philosophes and patriotic republicans assailed privileges. The era culminated in the leveling of European societies through the French Revolution and the industrial revolution. Enrollment limited to 40.

The emergence, expansion and maintenance of the Russian Empire to 1929. The dynamics of pan-imperial institutions and processes (imperial dynasty, peasantry, nobility, intelligentsia, revolutionary movement), as well as the development of the multitude of nations and ethnic groups conquered by or included into the empire. Focus on how the multinational Russian empire dealt with pressures of modernization (nationalist challenges in particular), internal instability and external threats. Enrollment limited to 40.

A critical investigation of a thousand years of globalization, centering on China, Persia, and Britain. How did Europe, a mere cape of Asia, come to dominate much of the planet politically and culturally? Ventures by Vikings, Crusaders, conquistadors, missionaries, traders, settlers, revolutionaries, and feminists. How distinctive forms of family, state, religion, and economy participated in and grew out of imperialism. Open to all students. Enrollment limited to 40.

The career and conquests of Alexander the Great (d. 323 B.C.) wrought far-reaching consequences for many in Europe, Asia and Africa. In the ensuing Hellenistic (Greek-oriented) commonwealth that spanned the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia and India, Greco-Macedonians interacted with Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Iranians, Indians and Romans in ways that galvanized ideas and institutions such as the classical city as ideal community, cult of divine kings and queens, "fusion" literatures, mythologies and artistic canons and also provoked nativist responses such as the Maccabean revolt.

An introduction to major developments and interactions among people in Europe and Asia before modernity. The Silk Roads, long distance networks that allowed people, goods, technology, religious beliefs, and other ideas to travel between China, India, and Rome/Mediterranean, and the many points in between, developed against the backdrop of the rise and fall of steppe nomadic empires in Inner Asia. The course examines these as interrelated phenomena that shaped Eurasian encounters to the rise of the world-conquering Mongols and the journey of Marco Polo.

(Formerly GRK 214.) An exploration of the poetic masterpieces of the Archaic period. Students study some of the songs bards performed to the accompaniment of the lyre, stories of war, exile and homecoming, monsters and divinities, love and lust. Readings are chosen from works such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, the Homeric Hymns. Prerequisite: GRK 215 or equivalent.