HIST 140
The World since 1945
NOTE: Multiple instructors teach HIST 140. Please scroll down to view the various course descriptions.
W. Miles Fletcher
Purpose: This course examines important events and developments in world history since 1945. We cover significant trends within nations, in international relations, and in transnational interactions. Although a semester permits coverage of only a few topics, we can gain an understanding of some major forces that have shaped the post-1945 world and that continue to influence our lives today.
The topics include World War II; the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Islamic revolution, conflict in the Middle East, terrorism, decolonization, the struggles of developing nations to attain stability and prosperity, the "rise" of Asia, trends in Europe, and the impact of “globalization.” Some important themes that pertain to many of the topics that we will study are the significance of competing ideological ideals, the sources of international conflicts and their resolution, and the challenges of nation-building as well as the complex interaction of local ethnic and religious identities, state-centered nationalism, and transnational forces.
The course also aims at enhancing students' ability to analyze complex historical issues, assess historical sources, and to construct lucid and cogent interpretations based on evidence. The discussions, papers, and examinations are designed with this goal in mind.
Requirements: Written assignments include two analytical papers, each five pages in length, a mid-term examination, and a final examination.
The reading centers on a half-dozen paperback books and other materials made available to the class. Examples of the reading include John Hersey’s classic work, Hiroshima, a selection of documents on the Vietnam War, The Shia Revival (by Vali Nasr), Mexican Lives (by Judith Adler Hellman), China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic (by Seng Ye), Slovenka Drakulic, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague (by Slovenka Drakulic), and The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy (by Pietra Rivoli).
Discussion of the assigned reading is important, and there are at least eight scheduled discussion sessions in the course. Moreover, the paper assignments tend to focus on the assigned reading.
Don Reid
The Spring 2008 edition of my “The World Since 1945” will examine the history of the post-World War II world with particular attention devoted to sexuality, gender, labor, colonialism, state socialism, collective memory, and terror as historical subjects and as categories of historical analysis. The course will meet on M and W for lecture, including occasional screening and discussion of snippets of films, including Godzilla and Animal Farm, as historical sources and alternative historical narratives. On Thursday and Friday, there will be mandatory sections, so be sure to sign up for one of these. Half the sections will be devoted to discussion of written texts like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew and Baya Gacemi’s I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist, and half to the discussion of films. The weeks in which a film will be discussed in section, it will be screened on Tuesday evening.
The alchemist will determine your grade by putting the following in the beaker in specified proportions: quizzes (30%), papers (40%), discussion sections (20%) and the final exam (10%). There will be no midterm, but there will be a number of 6-question multiple choice quizzes (dates of these quizzes on the syllabus) on the written and cinematic texts to be discussed in the upcoming section and on the lectures since the preceding quiz. I know everyone misses an occasional class due to illness, car or bus trouble, court dates, etc., or has a bad day (on an unfair quiz), so your two lowest quiz grades (or missed quizzes) will not be counted. Over the course of the semester, you will write two 5-to-7 page papers on material assigned for the class. You will be given five prompts which lay out expectations for these papers (and will choose the subjects of your two papers from among them); these prompts are intended to encourage creative, innovative, well-supported analyses. It’s a lot more rewarding to read papers like that. You will also receive a grade on your section attendance and the quality of your contribution to discussion in section. The final exam will take the form of the screening of a previously unidentified feature-length film about which you will then take the remainder of the exam period to write a critical essay, placing the film in the context of the history of the world since 1945, with particular emphasis on the film’s relation to materials discussed in lecture and in discussion during the semester.
Chad Bryant
This course will focus on a number of key issues in the post-1945 world. Some of our themes relate to common, local events with worldwide significance, such as increasing urbanization and the century’s many instances of genocide and forced population movements. Other themes will look at how peoples around the world have become more “connected,” the course will also ask how globalization has strengthened and/or weakened local, regional, and national identities. Topics related to the theme of globalization will include the development of the global economy, consumption practices, migration, travel and tourism, communication technologies and practices, and changing conceptions of time and space around the globe. We will conclude with a discussion of American “hegemony” and alternative visions for the “new world order” emanating from different parts of the globe. We will ask how people living outside the United State have sought to define their place in a rapidly changing, unstable, and interconnected world.