Course | Description |
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HI 103 Nineteenth Century America | This course traces the development of the United States from fledgling nation striving for its own identity to a sophisticated, mature member of the community of nations. From the early years of the 19th century to the early years of the 20th, the course explores the political, economic, social and physical growth of the nation. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 104 Twentieth Century America | This course is designed to give students a basic understanding of the political, economic, social, and diplomatic history of the United States in the century that defined America as a major world power. Emphasis is on those areas marked by changes that have and still do influence our lives today, i.e., social and cultural norms, the role of the presidency, partisan politics, America's world position, race and gender relations, and the American reform impulse. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 130 The Ancient Mediterranean World | This course will explore the cultures located around the Mediterranean Sea from approximately 2000 BCE to 500 CE, including the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and North Africa. The focus will be on a broad overview of these cultures and their most significant developments, as well as the numerous and complex interactions between these cultures which spread wealth and knowledge throughout the Mediterranean. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 207 Crime and Punishment in America | This course examines the history of crime and punishment in the United States. We operate under the premise that penal codes do not evolve in a vacuum. Rather they represent significant social and political decisions. Society determines and then lawmakers codify what behavior is unacceptable and will constitute a crime. Consequently, what was a crime at one time may be an accepted practice in another. |
HI 213 African American History, Part I | This course traces the African American experience from the colonial period to the turn of the 20th century. Included are discussions of slavery, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction adjustment. Also included are discussions of the various strategies for survival employed by African Americans both slave and free and the often conflicting assessments of those strategies by contemporaries and historians. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 214 African American History, Part II | Part I of African American History traces the experience of black America from slavery to the end of the 1800s. This course continues that journey through the 20th century. It begins with the economic, political, and social conditions faced by African Americans at the turn-of-the-century and then assesses the various, and often competing strategies employed by African Americans to survive and flourish in a racist America. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 215 World Culture and Civilization | In every age of human existence people have sought to express themselves using dance, drama, art, architecture, philosophy, music and literature. This course is aimed at giving students the opportunity to develop an understanding of how humankind has used those areas of self-expression sometimes referred to as the fine arts. The course is in no way intended to make the student an expert in any one area but rather is to serve as a sampler to the expressions, allowing the student to become more aware, more open-minded, and more sensitive in the areas mentioned. This course is also intended to allow students to begin to develop an aesthetic awareness and some skills in artistic discrimination. The end result of this course would be an individual who has a better understanding of society and of oneself. This course fulfills the Foreign Culture and Language General Education requirement. |
HI 223 Emergence of Modern America 1900-1945 | This course explores the emerging political, economic, social, and diplomatic characteristics of America in the modern age. Special attention will be given to how industrialization and immigration contributed to the urbanization of America; the alignment of political philosophies and economic policies; the emergence of the United States as a global power; and changing attitudes about race, gender, and class. |
HI 224 Cold War America | This course focuses on the foreign policy and domestic affairs of the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. We will examine the diplomatic and military strategies used to contain communism, how the social and cultural tensions of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., the Civil Rights movement and counter-culturalism) affected conceptions of race, class, and gender, and the way the nation’s leaders articulated the ideal of “American exceptionalism” in a global context. |
HI 288 World History and Geography I | This is a survey course of global geography and human history. |
HI 289 World History and Geography II | This is a survey course of global geography and human history. Emphasis is placed on: a) gaining a basic knowledge of the critical events in world history; b) gaining a basic knowledge of political and physical geography and the ways in which they are both cause and effect of history; and c) understanding the events at a global level, that is, being able to identify events as taking place in the same periods even though they happened in different regions. This course is half of a two-semester series. Although ideally students will take both courses, each may stand alone and can be taken in any order. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 308 Women's History | This course is about the exclusion of American women from their national history and the efforts of women's historians to compensate for that omission. Historians have not only chronicled the history of women and examined the social, political, and economic restrictions placed on them by socially-determined gender definitions, but, in a discipline previously dominated by political history, they have elevated concerns important to women-love and marriage, child birth and child rearing, domesticity, housework, and reproductive rights-to legitimate issues of historical inquiry. More recently, women's historians have challenged the traditional framework of American history, a history written by and for men, to deconstruct and re-conceptualize a national history in which women are not merely peripheral but are crucial to the development of the country. Utilizing the accumulated information, perspectives, and theories generated by this scholarship, this course examines the history of American women chronologically and thematically through the twentieth century. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |
HI 309 Women’s History, Part II: The “Other” Experience | This course looks at American Women’s history from the perspectives of race, ethnicity and class. While the initial work done by historians in women’s history defined and analyzed the gender expectations of women from the dominant white middle-class, more recent scholarship measures those expectations of gender against the experiences of women from disadvantaged populations. From the first encounters with Natives, through the enslavement of Africans, and the marginalization of Southern and Eastern European and Asians, to the lingering impact of stereotyping throughout the 20th century, this course examines the particular experience of women from each of these non-dominant cultures. |
HI 310 Making Sense of the Sixties | This course provides an in-depth examination of a pivotal decade in American history the 1960s. During this short period of time, radical changes occurred in the way Americans thought about themselves, their world role, relations between the genders, races, and classes, government responsibility and jurisdiction, and social and cultural norms. Confrontations, endemic in times of cast social and political change, threatened the survival of the nation. Through documentary video, readings in the contemporary literature and historical interpretation and classroom discussions, students explore the details of the decade, commentary upon it, and its long-term legacies. This course fulfills the American History/Western Civilization General Education requirement. |