Examines the confrontation, assimilation, and transformation of Amerindian, African, and European cultures in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present. Focuses on the processes in which distinctive self-images emerged in the region and how these images have been challenged and changed over time. Uses films, literature, and folk traditions to complement scholarly analysis of the emergence of a New World mentality.

This course introduces the history of the United States from Reconstruction to the present. Our themes include the nation's relationship to the world; the evolution of racial, gendered, and class hierarchies; the transformation of the federal government; and the changing forms of domestic life, work, consumer capitalism, politics, social protest, and cultural expression. How have the people of the United States struggled over such values as freedom, equality, prosperity, and progress?

Britain has long been considered an exemplary modern nation, credited, for example, with the world's first industrial economy, modern institutions of representative politics, a vibrant public sphere, a powerful war and welfare state, and one of the largest empires in world history. Using a combination of primary and secondary source readings, classroom lectures and discussions, and various written assessments, this course will ask how modern imperial Britain was made and how this history relates to the broader currents of world history.

Surveys the major movements and developments in Europe during the era of European expansion and dominance--from the devastations of the Thirty Years War to the Second World War--and up to the current era of European Union. Topics include: the French Revolution and the birth of nationalism; the scientific and industrial revolutions; the modern history of international relations; imperialism, fascism, the Holocaust, the two World Wars, and the present and potential roles of Europe at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Introduces the basic concepts, methodologies, and research findings in information retrieval. Special topics include Web searching, cross-language retrieval, data mining, and data extraction. Completion of this course will provide the necessary foundation to work in today's business environment where competitive advantage is obtained by retrieving needed information.

An introduction to the issues involved in orchestrating the use of computer resources. Topics include operating system evolution, file-handling systems, memory management, virtual memory, resource scheduling, multiprogramming, deadlocks, concurrent processes, protection, and design principles. Course emphasis: understanding the effects of operating system design on computer system performance. This course is programming intensive.

How does Mapquest find the best route between two locations? How do computers help to decode the human genome? At the heart of these and other complex computer applications are nontrivial algorithms. While algorithms must be specialized to an application, there are some standard ways of approaching algorithmic problems that tend to be useful in many applications. Among other topics, we will explore graph algorithms, greedy algorithms, divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and network flow.

Are there any limits to what computers can do? Does the answer to this question depend on whether you use a PC or a Mac? Is C more powerful than PASCAL? This seminar explores these questions by investigating several models of computation, illustrating the power and limitations of each of these models, and relating them to computational problems and applications. Topics include finite state automata, pushdown automata, grammars, Turing machines, the Universal Turing Machine, and computability.

This course is a discussion and practicum for students currently acting as mentors in the Computer Science Megas and Gigas Educate (MaGE) peer mentoring program. Through discussion, we will draw connections between the peer mentor experience and existing research and philosophies of peer mentoring and computer science education, to develop effective practical strategies.