HIST 259

Fall 2014 All Classes

All Classes

20thC World from Midcentury

Credit: 3 hours.

Economic, social, political, and cultural developments in twentieth-century world history from Second World War era to the present.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Hist & Phil

Cultural Studies - Western

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HIST 259 class schedule data for fall 2014
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	43297	Lecture-Discussion	A	11:00AM -12:50PM	MWF	106 David Kinley Hall	Magdo, Z	Part of Term: B Date Range: 10/20/14-12/10/14 Degree Notes: Hist&Philosoph Perspect, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: Description: Most commonly perceived as dangerously escapist, fantastic dreams about perfect societies, utopias often evoke dismissal for lying perpetually in another time and place. Yet, as the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring or Hollywood movies about impending global apocalypse remind us, utopian desire for a better society constitutes a critical engagement with the historical present in the attempt to transform it into a plausible future. Over the course of times, utopias have led ambivalent lives, often inspiring revolutionary change and global affinities across racial, class, gender, religious and national hierarchies, while descending on occasion into worldwide wars, violence, and oppression. Hence, this course will explore utopia/dystopia in world history through a series of integrated and overarching themes: politics, revolutions, war, and everyday utopianism in society and culture. After pausing briefly on the late 19th century, when the utopian imagination went around the globe, the course will examine radical thought and politics after 1945 up to the early 1980s, when utopia's death was hastily announced. We will trace the global roots and routes of such visions and practices across the global north (Europe and North America) and the global south (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) as they sought to remake historical presents in hope of alternative, better futures. Students will explore utopianism's relationship to history, ideology, and global modernity; revolutionary movements, wars and the politics of exclusion; the arts; everyday practices of sexuality, nutrition and consumption; and the spaces of utopia, whether the state, the built environment, intentional communities or cyberspace. This course includes an undergraduate research component. The main assignment is a group multimedia project that will enable students to practice history as a processual and collaborative form of intellectual exercise. Published in the framework of a class e-book, such projects will allow students to involve a wider audience in thinking about utopia/dystopia and historical scholarship and will make their work portable beyond the classroom.