SNRSCH1135 - HIST 2819-Global Connections

Course Description

This course introduces students to major themes in global history over the past two centuries. It will chart the trajectory of transnational human relations from the overlapping cosmopolitan webs of the early nineteenth century to the global webs of the early twenty-first century. The course will place equal weight on economic, political, and cultural transformations. Students will explore the economic, political, social, and cultural changes that attended the growth and increasing integration of these webs. They will study the constant tension between conflict and cooperation that simultaneously brought them closer together and pulled them farther apart. The course will help students understand the origins of the current world system by exploring global transformations since the American and French revolutions. Themes include the rise of nationalism; the revolutions of 1848; American expansion; industrialization; the opening of Japan; colonialism; imperialism; world migrations; the decline of the British and the rise of the American empire in the first half of the 20th century; the two World Wars; the cold war; decolonization movements in the 1950s; cultural and economic globalization; and the transportation and communication revolutions of the last third of the 20th century.