CURRENT CLASSES

HIST 112 : European Civilization since 1500
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The history of the European Civilization is an introduction to a civic virtue. It shows how the Europeans made their Civilization but it also gives the first insight into how civilization changes and often against its makers’ intentions. By exploring the European Civilization we locate ourselves in time and place and thus help judging our own position and possibilities. Moreover, the history of the European Civilization is an intellectual adventure during which we find our basic assumptions and values constantly challenged. What is state? What do we mean by race? What is European and what is Non-European? Can we compare Hitler to Stalin? Is America a part of the European Civilization?

HIST 218: Europe in the Twentieth Century
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This course is a survey of formative experiences in European history from 1871 through the end of the Cold War. The twentieth century has been the bloodiest century in World history and Europe has been the central stage in that bloodletting. How is it possible that after all that suffering and chaos Europe emerged as a continent of relative stability and prosperity in the second half of the century? The course examines this question by probing the changes in the global position of Europe, the World Wars, and the Cold War. It traces the reconstruction of the New Europe after the 1940s, the generational battles between students and their parents in the 1960s, and the collapse of Soviet Union. It gives special attention to European diversity of ethnicities and ideological battles by asking, for instance, how Marxism and Fascism influenced European mindset. Finally, the course explores the everyday life by asking how the values, gender roles, and lifestyles changed in European societies.

HIST 220: The Holocaust
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This course discusses the persecution and mass killing of European Jews by Nazi Germany. We will explore antisemitism in historical context. We will explore the complexities of ultimate moral choices, in the context of a fundamental experience of the twentieth century, by asking why killers became killers, why victims became victims, and what the victims experienced, how they shaped their everyday life and how the gender differences influenced their experience. Finally, we will study how and why the outside world, the civilians and the foreign governments and intellectuals reacted or failed to react to the Holocaust.

HIST 296: German History
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This course is an examination of the German historical path from 1848 to 1990. It starts with the investigation of Germany’s struggle toward modernization and unification in the late nineteenth century. It explores Germany’s experience and role in the bloodshed of the World War I, the cultural euphoria, political misery, and economic despair of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, and the Holocaust. The course surveys Germany’s role in the bipolar world of the Cold War and the cultural battles of the 1960s. It ends with an examination of the surprising national reunification in 1990.

HIST 374: History of Emotions
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This course is a research seminar on one of the most profound features of our individual makeup and its development during the last five hundred years. We will explore what are emotions? How were they used and manipulated? Could a middle class man have ambitions? Or a middle class woman? What was love? What were the institutions of love? What are emotives? What were the emotions and reactions of those men whose duty was to destroy all enemies of the nation? Why are Americans cool? These are some of the questions we attempt to answer in this seminar. Although European history (old or modern) will take central place, projects on the history of emotions in Americas are welcome as well.

IDIS/HIST 294: Emotions
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Conceptions of emotions and moral choice have varied widely. Whereas the Stoics denied the role of emotions in any sound moral judgment, recent moral thinking has rediscovered the ideas of Adam Smith who, in the late eighteenth century, argued that any moral judgment is preceded by what he called a moral sentiment. Increasing psychological interest in child development and emotion management has opened new perspectives in understanding how we develop as mature ethical beings. Finally, the devastating historical experiences of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb have placed us in unprecedented ethical situation.
In trying to find answers to this new ethical situation we will resort to expertise in emotion studies, because moral judgments are not purely cognitive processes. They are actions that take place in the intersection of knowledge, emotional predisposition, and emotional self-control. Placed in this intersection we display more or less universal patterns of behavior by virtue of the structure of our mind and psychological disposition. But if our behavior has changed and if, as some historians have argued, the emotions have changed, is our moral life then different from our ancestors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?


Courses previously taught

Social history of Honor, 1700 -1945
The Protestant Reformation
Western Civilization I
Western Civilization II
German History, 1871 - 1945
German History, 1763 - 1871
The Book and the Making of Modern Europe
Introduction to German Intellectual History, 1770 - 1914
The Holocaust