This course is designed to engage students in conversations about particular perspectives on the history of a selected nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon as specified by the respective instructor. By taking this course, students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for, some combination of: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may also explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the complex political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors and subject will vary.

What causes some democracies to succeed, others to fail? What shortcomings of democracy permit strongmen to take power? This course uses comparative methods, surveying numerous societies over 200 years of history, to seek answers. Early democrats—called liberals—had no idea of challenges that lay ahead from movements like fascism or communism. Apostles of reason, they took for granted that humans could organize their affairs and create stable democratic order. The thrilling months of early 1848 appeared to confirm their optimism: people across Europe threw aside kings and princes and claimed the right to govern themselves. Yet within months the old rulers assembled armies to crush the democracy, and in following decades Europeans attained rights of self-rule inch by inch, challenged by socialists and nationalists who said that democracy must realized the rights of human beings and nations to equality. It was not until the United States helped defeat Germany in WWI that democracy seemed to triumph: in its first major act of foreign policy at Paris in 1919, the US helped create republics across Central and Eastern Europe, as kings and emperors fled the scene. Yet beginning in Italy in 1922, the new democratic order was crumbling, giving way to radical nationalists who claimed to do a better job in representing the people than parliamentary democracy. Meanwhile, in Russia a radical socialism likewise proclaimed the end of liberal "bourgeois" democracy. Political elites in France or Britain seemed weak and reactive. Fortunately Stalin's armies came to the rescue in 1941, bearing the brunt of the burden of saving civilization—and democracy—from Hitler; but having achieved victory, the two sides divided, and with them the European continent. The result in the west was thirty "golden" years of liberal democratic prosperity, and in the east "people's democracy," a less glitzy form of mostly stable consumer society, known to us as communism. Why did western democracy perform so well? Was it because communism, with full unemployment and state sponsored education, forced liberal capitalist democracies to confront questions of social equality? After 1989, the west emerged victorious in the Cold War, but recent years have recalled the bleak 1930s; again democratic order gives way to illiberal, nationalist forms of rule. Why? Do we again face fascism? History suggests that our predicament has to do with the failure of liberal democracy to address national and social questions, but participants in the class will be invited to help figure this out.

Lectures will be delivered during scheduled class times via Zoom, and also recorded for asynchronous viewing.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills