HIST 132-201World History Since 1500 [UGRD, MAIN, 1] Instructor: Marcus B Filippello (filippem@uwm.edu) Meets: No Meeting Pattern In reading the news, watching television, or simply looking out of the proverbial contemporary window, do you ever ask: How do we explain or account for all of this? This class will encourage students to seek answers to this question by investigating the nature of human interactions and examining cross-cultural exchanges that have taken place across the globe for more than five centuries. In forming some possible conclusions, we will focus on patterns of migration, processes of imperial formation, and how people have “made” our “modern” world. Although we will examine some of these themes by highlighting Europeans’ relationship with peoples in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas, rest assured we will devote considerable attention emphasizing the roles non-Europeans played in enacting a sense of agency and altering the course of global history.
HIST 151-201American History: 1607 to 1877 Instructor: Lex Renda (renlex@uwm.edu) Meets: No Meeting Pattern For more than a century before the American Revolution, and for another century afterwards, the inhabitants of North America fought, with both words and blood, over whom to identify as the “People,” and thus deserving of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” as well as over what sort of government and other political institutions could most likely guarantee such rights. This course will chronicle the rise of representative government in the United States, looking at its myriad forms and debates over what it should look like and what powers it should possess, as well as the political parties through which those who were enfranchised sought to shape the same. We shall also examine how immigration, religious conflict, and economic change led to the development of distinctive social classes in America, how “freedom” meant different things to different people (based on race, class, religion, and gender) at different times, and how the institutions and ideas of freedom and slavery in America became intertwined. The purpose here is not to indoctrinate you; instead, it is to encourage you to conceptualize the American past as something more engaging and more complex than either a "proud story with a few shameful chapters" or a "shameful story with a few proud chapters."