Designed primarily to permit the instructors to deal with a topic with which they are especially concerned, usually more restricted than the subject matter of a regular lecture course. A combination of informal lectures and discussions, term papers, and examinations. Instructors and subject to vary. Consult department website during pre-enrollment week each semester for specific topic.

In this course we will examine the fascinating, competing histories and cultures of the Baltic coast city known variously as Danzig and Gdańsk (among other spellings and forms). First a medieval Slavic (Polish/Kashubian) fishing village, then a growing port city under the rule of the Teutonic Knights of the Cross (XIV century), then the largest city of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (XV century to 1795). Freed from the hated overlordship of the Teutonic Order and, as the chief city of Royal Prussia (a semi-autonomous district of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Gdańsk (still largely German speaking and a Hanseatic city) was Poland’s main access to the wider world through export and import. Except for a brief period of intendant status as, once again, a “Free City” in Napoleonic times (1807–1814), from 1795 (the Third Partition of Poland) to 1918 (end of WWI), Danzig was a city of diminished significance in the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire. In the twentieth century, it became a focal point of German-Polish tensions. The Treaty of Versailles (1918) did many things: among them it created a “Free State (not “City”) of Gdańsk,” governed (loosely) by the League of Nations; it also resurrected a free and independent Second Polish Republic, still a multi-ethnic federation, but with much changed borders, and with a promise of “free and secure access to the sea.”

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills