Introductory
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Reason and Freedom
This course emphasizes the foundations of the modern world. Reason and Freedom explores the self-conscious nature of modernity and its belief in reason, and explores the paradoxes of our position in history. It examines the…
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Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, an art that has a long and noble tradition. Understanding the art of persuasion entails at least two things: one, understanding how the arguments made by others work; two,…
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Scholarship: War, Conflict, and History
War has long played a central role in the human experience and the scholarship of history; indeed, it might be said that the first “scientific historian” was the Athenian historian Thucydides, author of the History…
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The World in Turmoil
This course will introduce you to some key issues in the history of the twentieth century. The issues with which the course deals are central to an understanding of the most turbulent century in the…
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Texts: Persian Letters
This course will focus on the Persian Letters. Published under cover of anonymity in 1721, this curious and clever epistolary novel rapidly became a runaway bestseller, catapulting its author, quickly unmasked as Charles Louis Secondat,…
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Culture: Cities, Makers of Modernity
In the eighteenth and increasingly in the nineteenth century, a curious thing happened: an age-old balance between large agrarian populations and small urban centers began to shift dramatically in favor of urban centers. Cities grew…