This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants who are native speakers.

This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants who are native speakers.

This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants who are native speakers.

This course emphasizes understanding, speaking, and writing in a contemporary context. It also promotes creativity with presentations and original group projects. It includes Web activities, films, short stories, and frequent conversation sessions with language assistants who are native speakers.

Did African nations become poorer in the 20th century because development initiatives were badly executed? inherently exploitative? ill-timed? Looking beyond the caricatures of evil colonial officers, lazy peasants, or greedy elites, who do we see engaged in productive activity and what are they doing? What concepts and categories illumine our understanding of their actions? How does a careful exploration of the nature of exchange and production in Africa revise our perception of the global economy in the present?

This course examines the lives of women in imperial China (221 BCE-1911). How did Confucian didactic texts define women and their place in the family? Seen as the core of the family in a patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical society, men prescribed women's roles in family life. How did women understand and respond to the social expectations imposed on them? What changed over the long history of imperial China? Students consider writings by and about women alongside the evidence of material culture.

This course will examine the maturation of North American slave regimes after the American Revolution and the diverse activities of people who worked to abolish slavery. The assorted motives of white opponents of slavery and the actions of both free and enslaved African Americans to achieve freedom will be highlighted. We will analyze the mechanics of biracial coalition building and assess the historical legacy of these activists for subsequent social movements.

Exploration of the history of Afro-Latin American populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. We will question why and how to study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny.

The vast region of North America between the Mississippi River and Pacific Ocean has been a site of many migrations, conflicts, political transformations, and environmental changes. This course examines dynamic histories of Native American tribes, Euro-American "explorers" and colonists, cowboys and miners, Asian immigrant laborers, and mariners, all of whom helped create interior and oceanic worlds. It focuses on natural and human changes in specific locales, and also explores how public histories at these places shape the present and future.

This course is designed for intermediate and advanced dancers interested in performing. The work developed will be performed in the Five College Faculty Dance Concert at Amherst College, March 2-4, 2017.