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Mondays	Topic
Jan 14	Introduction to the course/absolute monarchy; setting the stage for Ivan IV and Louis XIV
Jan 21	Ivan’s reign 1547-1584 and the place of Ivan in Russian history; Louis’s reign 1661-1715, Colbert and mercantilism; Ivan and Louis in the films of Eisenstein and Rossellini
Jan 28	Scientific progress begets the Enlightenment, which begets the French Revolution of 1789; images and documents of the French Revolution; Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
Feb 4 Feb 11	The enlightened despotism of Catherine II of Russia and Napoleonic France; Napoleon on film in Bondarchuk’s Waterloo The industrial revolution; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776); Robert Owen and New Lanark; Marx and the Communist Manifesto (1848)
Feb 18	Nationalism and imperialism; background, course, and aftermath of the Great War 1914-1918 through the treaty of Versailles (1919)
Feb 25	Catch up and review for midterm exam
Mar 3	MIDTERM EXAMINATION IN CLASS
Mar 10	Spring Break----no class
Mar 17	Background background and course of the Russian revolution of 1917; Lenin and Stalin; return and discuss exams
Mar 24 Mar 31	Rise and regime of the Nazis; exercise in class: the Reichstag elections of 1932; view portions of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will Background and course of World War II; exercise in class: whether to use the A-bomb; video from The World at War
Apr 7 Apr 14 Apr 21 Apr 28	No class; small groups meet with instructor, in prep for in-class reports; tour of NASM’s Dulles Udvar-Hazy Center this week… day&time TBA The recent past: 1968 and all that; the “long boom,” the “clash of civilizations”, and the coming century Small group reports in class Small group reports in class
May 5	take-home final exam due, 12 noon in rm LC 304

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REQUIRED READING: you will see other books for sale for HIS 102 in the campus bookstore, but we will be using only these…

Perry, Western Civilization, vol.II (the bookstore has the current, 7^th edition, but any edition is acceptable for this course);

You will be required to read and write short papers on any two of these three works; they are not available in the bookstore, but there are online, full-text versions readily available: Mary Wollstonecraft, A vindication of the rights of women, Adam Smith, The wealth of nations, Karl Marx, The communist manifesto; due dates for these two papers will be established during the course;

A short, 2-page book report (due at the end of the course) is required on either of these books, both of which are for sale (for HIS 102) in the campus bookstore:

Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/denisovich/about.html

Achebe, Things Fall Apart www.sparknotes.com/lit/things/context.html

Useful information about these two books, upon which we may draw in class, may be found in the links above

also it is possible some selected readings TBA will be kept at the library circ desk reserve shelves for HIS 102/Blois

students will also be asked to consult and critique a website in-progress of your instructor’s authorship, WesternCivWashington, which may be viewed at www.nvcc.edu/home/bblois/westcivwash

EVALUATION:

class attendance 20%
midterm exam 30%
3 short papers 15%, group reports 15%
final examination 20%

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HIS 102/Blois

Additional Information about the Course

MIDTERM EXAMINATION--will consist of three sections: a map identification quiz, an essay, and capsule biographies; before the test, we will review the relevant textbook maps (from which the quiz items will come), and discuss a set of potential essays and bio subjects from which, at the time of the test, your instructor will make selections; relative grade weighting for each section of the test will be announced in advance; the midterm exam will account for 30% of the final grade for HIS 101 and without a passing grade for the midterm examination (ie, a grade of "D" or above) it will be impossible to pass this course

THREE SHORT PAPERS—-see information above; these papers should be typed, dbl-spaced, with 1" margins; style, source selection, and other matters of form will be discussed in class; all papers for this course (except exams) will receive a one-half letter grade bonus if reviewed prior to submission in the campus Writing Center; for all papers, style and mechanicals (spelling, grammar, etc) will count for and against you; The Loudoun Campus Interdisciplinary Writing Center is open five days a week in room LC 268 to provide free one-on-one consultations about your writing; the center’s hours are 9am-3pm Monday through Thursday and 9am-1pm on Friday; evening hours are TBA and will be posted on the center door; the center can also help you with all types of professional correspondence including university application letters, resumes, etc; the center phone # is 703-450-2511; center director is Mr Jeremy Ruane

CAMPUS AND COLLEGE LIBRARY RESOURCES—The online NVCC library catalog may be accessed at www.nvcc.edu/library

OPTIONAL ACTIVITY—On a date to be announced, there will be an optional tour of the new Dulles Center of the National Air and Space Museum. The tour will be led by a senior National Park Service historian and will focus on aircraft of World War II and the role of airpower within this global struggle. Though this activity is strictly optional, extra course credit will be afforded those who participate.

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OTHER IMPORTANT DATES DURING THE SEMESTER:

January 23---end of drop/add; last day to drop with refund

March 18---last day to drop the course without grade penalty

COURSE DESCRIPTION: HIS 102 surveys selected events, personalities, and trends in the history of Western civilization from early modern times until the present; the instructor's approach is episodic--that is, some topics will be covered in comparative depth, while others will get very short treatment or none at all; most classes will consist of a topical lecture (see class schedule) and a period of discussion of a reading, a handout, or questions that arise from the class; some classes will include slides or video; at least one (optional) class session will take place at the NASM Dulles Center

GENERAL COURSE GOALS: by completing this course, students will

1. acquire and be able to demonstrate a basic factual awareness of European history's broad outlines in modern times

2. develop a general knowledge of how historians think and work and how the skills of the historian, including especially the ability to think analytically and critically, are transferable to broader concerns of individuals and societies

3. develop a sense of the value, and limitations, of comparing current events with the past, searching for the "lessons" of history

4. demonstrate basic competence in researching and writing brief essays drawing on their interpretation of European history

5. improve their writing, library, and computer skills

ENTRY LEVEL SKILLS: students should be able read and digest college level text books; the total assigned reading for this course (from text and paperbacks) is approximately 700 pages; note-taking will be important, as will be the ability to identify geographic locations; the ability to compose and then record from memory answers to biographical and essay questions is also very important; rudimentary typing and computer skills are highly desirable

CLASS ATTENDANCE--your instructor places great emphasis on class attendance and participation

All of the above is subject to revision, when discussed and agreed upon by instructor and class, during the semester. During the semester, audio files of class lectures, outlines of class presentations, and various maps, handouts, and photographs used in class will be added to the instructor’s website at www.nvcc.edu/home/bblois

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JANUARY 14

Absolute Monarchy in Theory and Practice back to Schedule

European monarchies in the Middle Ages typically drew support from, and were consequently somewhat limited by, the church and the feudal nobility. Collectively, these three institutions—royalty, nobility, and clergy—made up the state, which in turn governed the powerless town dwellers and the agricultural peasants, who were often enserfed. The weakening of both the church and the nobility in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries, as well as the wealth accumulated by some monarchs during the commercial revolution, paved the way for absolute monarchy in nations where both social unity and royal ambition were present.

Divine right monarchy was an embellishment of absolutism made possible by the position kings had assumed as head of both state and church, even in nations, such as France, which remained primarily Catholic. The remark attributed to Louis XIV, “I am the state,” could be termed the virtual motto of Bourbon dynastic absolutism; moreover, the question concerning whether the king actually made this statement is unimportant, since he in any event acted in its spirit throughout his long reign.

Theories supporting absolute monarchy spring from the writings of both Machiavelli, in the early sixteenth century, and from those of Jean Bodin in the latter years of this century. In both cases, the writers were responding, at least in part, to unusually chaotic times and to the need for order, princely power, and consolidated sovereignty. One of the fullest theoretical defenses of abso.lutism is in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, who advocated srong and orderly government in the turbulent England of the mid-seventeenth century. But it was John Locke’s notion of limited government which gained the ascendancy in England following the vicissitudes of the Stuarts and the Protectorate.

READ: textbook chapter 16

JANUARY 21

Ivan IV and Louis XIV as Examples of Absolutism back to schedule

Ivan and Louis stand as perhaps the two salient examples of full-blown absolute monarchy in European history, though in differing contexts and centuries and—in both cases—without the ‘leavening’ of enlightened despotism. More than any other rulers in the history of Russia and France, they congealed their respective nations into a paradigm of, on the one hand, serfdom and autocracy and, on the other, centralized royal authority, religious intolerance, and a robust mercantilist economy.

READ: textbook chapter 16

See also www.metopera.org as its Saturday, Jan 31 broadcast (1pm), the Met Opera will perform Mussorgskii’s “Boris Godunov”

January 28

Scientific Progress, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution back to Schedule

The Enlightenment was one of the most significant intellectual movements in European history. Perhaps one should say “is” one of the most significant movements, since the Enlightenment was the birthplace of ideas, institutions, and movements which in many cases have retained their currency into our own times.

Intellectually, the Enlightenment is in direct descent from the seventeenth century “scientific revolution”. The transitional figure between this movement and the age of philosophes is Isaac Newton. “Nature is pleased with simplicity,” Newton had written, and the Enlightenment quest for social improvement was largely driven by these three interwoven concepts: nature, pleasure, and simplicity. A society made “natural” and simple would be a pleasurable abode for mankind, so went the reasoning. That people fared best when permitted to be natural became axiomatic to those who drew inspiration from Newton. Monarchies made the opposite assumption: that people needed to be managed so as to be orderly. Exponents of monarchy seldom gave thought to social happiness (which was essentially a new idea of the 18^th century). Thus, conflict was predictable as the ideas of the Enlightenment spread.

Old regime Europe, characterized by monarchy—frequently by absolute monarchy—and mercantilism, proved unable to absorb its new critics. By the end of the 18^th century, a succession of political reverberations, but most demonstrably the French Revolution, had replaced Europe’s most entrenched absolute monarchy with a republic, and mercantilism had been intellectually devastated by the economic writings of Adam Smith.

The French revolutionary process, stretching across the decade from 1789 to 1799, was one of the most important events in European history. Nowhere was absolute monarchy more firmly rooted, and nowhere was it more vigorously challenged than in the homeland of Voltaire, Diderot, and other outspoken critics of the monarchical restraints on natural liberties. Louis XV and XVI had shown themselves impervious to the enlightened principles of their royal cousins Frederick of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia. The compound of Europe’s most unenlightened yet most absolutist royal government plus the most enlightened intelligentsia was a highly unstable one. The Enlightenment provided a vocabulary for protest, allowing grievances to ring with a universal sound. IN 1789, each component of the French social structure—aristocracy, bourgeois, peasantry, and urbanites—initiated revolutionary action, bringing Bourbon rule to an end.

READ: textbook chapters 17, 18, 19

http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/

www.bartleby.com/144/

FEBRUARY 4

Catherine II and Napoleon as Enlightened Despots back to Schedule

READ: textbook chapter 20

FEBRUARY 11

The Industrial Revolution and Marxism back to Schedule

Urbanization, widespread literacy, and rapid growth of systems of communication are just a few of the changes brought by the Industrial Age, which still conditions our lives. Except for the birth of cities and civilization more than 5000 years ago, no change in history can match the impact of industrialization. We have seen how the Enlightenment provided philosophic justification for political liberty, at the expense of monarchy; the industrial revolution occasioned the rise of economic liberty, highly valued by the new commercial and industrial classes. “When left alone, the world moves of its own accord,” a motto of the physiocrat economist and physician Quesnay, provides us with the phrase “laissez faire,” which also became the credo for classical economics as developed by adam Smith and his free trade-minded followers. As Smith was writing his Wealth of Nations, the first great industrial “take off” in history was occurring in 1770s’ England.

Just as the European middle classes were gaining ascendancy, in the mid-19^th century, Karl Marx declared that the bourgeois social order was but one stage in the process of historical change. Ultimately, it was the industrial proletariat which would control the social-economic infrastructure or means of production, asserted Marxian socialists. Within the new, industrial society, Marx had identified the central dynamic—the competing claims of workers and ownership.

READ: textbook chapters 21 & 24

www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/treatise/communist_manifesto/mancont.htm

FEBRUARY 18

Nationalism and Imperialism; background, course, and aftermath of the Great War back to Schedule

The Congress of Vienna, meeting at various times during 1814-1815, marked the end of the 25-year era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, a period during which large-scale wars were an almost annual occurrence. Consequently, the Vienna sessions, a process akin to 20^th century summitry, drew a conservative status quo ante bellum treaty settlement, and established the Concert of Europe to maintain the status quo and thwart revolutionary political change. Nonetheless, movements inspired by 1789 (and by the American example) continued to appear. In Spain, Russia, and Portugal these were unsuccessful, but Greek and Serbian movements did succeed lead to national independence, as did similar movements in Latin America.

Nationalism is the creed which underlies and supports modern and modernizing societies. It is a group consciousness or mentality of comparatively recent derivation, appearing for the first time in many parts of Europe around the time of Napoleon’s final defeat and exile in 1815. This was no coincidence. No single individual did more than Napoleon to congeal the national conscience of states like Spain and Russia, or of stateless societies like Italy and Germany. Every nation which had encountered the armies of revolutionary France had been forced to lok into itself for an antidote, for a source of inspiration and strength, with which to oppose Napoleon (while also absorbing the liberal political principles of the French).

READ: textbook chapters 23, 25, 26, 27, 29

FEBRUARY 25

Catch up and review for midterm examination back to Schedule

MARCH 3

Midterm examination in class back to Schedule

MARCH 10

Spring Break-----------------No Class back to Schedule

MARCH 17

Background and course of the Russian Revolution back to Schedule

The overthrow of Russia’s tsarist government had been discussed and planned by ardent men and women for nearly a century, yet when the 1917 revolution came, it took everyone by surprise. Eight months separated the tsar’s February/March abdication from the October/November power seizure by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The existence of the world’s first socialist state became one of the salient ‘problems’ of the interwar years.

READ: textbook chapter 29

MARCH 24

Rise and regime of Hitler and Nazism back to Schedule

There are two general schools of thought concerning the origins of fascism in Italy and Germany. The first centers on the concept of national character. To those who produced or were sympathetic to Nazism, being German meant being innately superior, being members of a master race. To those who bore the brunt of German aggression in World War II, in some cases for the second or third time in a century, to be German meant being innately destructive and militaristic. The second interpretation of fascism holds that it was a particular form of a slightly more generic 20^th century political phenomenon, totalitarianism. If the national character argument could be reduced to an axiom like “once a German, always one,” the totalitarian premise is that a movement like Hitler’s can only be understood in its own time, as well as place, and that Nazism is inconceivable outside the realities of the mid-20^th century. Totalitarianism in this analysis may be described as technologically-assisted dictatorship or, as someone has put it, “Genghis Khan with the telegraph.” In this view, Nazism, Italian fascism, and Stalinism may all be seen as examples of the species.

There will be a spring semester campus course on The Holocaust in History (HIS 298). It begins in mid-February and will be holding at least one class at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. If some of you are interested in going there with the class and their instructor, Dr David Fuchs, please let me know and I will arrange… and will allow this to serve as an extra credit activity for HIS 102. The museum’s website is

www.ushmm.org

READ: textbook chapter 30

MARCH 31

Background and course of World War II back to Schedule

In the interwar years 1919-1939 the western democracies turned their respective attention largely to intenal affairs. Differing approaches to German occupation and reparations speeded the centrifugal tendencies. France, the most devastated nation, naturally turned to reconstruction, with an eye to forcing Germany to underwrite as much of this as possible. England, on the other hand, sought a quick restoration of the German economy, though only after scores were settled. The U.S., least vindictive of the victorious powers, quickly made it apparent by its retreat to isolationism that its views would count for little.

The years between the wars also witnessed a dramatic upturn in the aspirations and exertions of the nations controlled by the imperial systems of England and France and other colonial powers. Maturing nationalist and independence movements, such as the Indian National Congress of Gandhi, began pressing for an end to colonialism. Short-lived postwar prosperity was ended by the Great Depression, and normalcy everywhere seemed illusive if not impossible.

The term “total war” is sometimes applied to World War II, since at no other moment in history have so many nations so completely mobilized toward a particular goal. We still live under the shadow, to some extent, of the violence, carnage, and irrationality of World War II, which instead of yielding to a systematic peace, was replaced by a new kind of struggle, the Cold War.

READ: textbook chapter 32

APRIL 7

No class--------------small groups meet with instructor back to Schedule

Besides small group sessions this week, there will also be an OPTIONAL class tour of the new National Air and Space Museum’s Dulles Udvar-Hazy Center. As part of the tour, I will introduce you to the Assistant Director of the museum who oversaw and directed its construction, Ms Lin Ezell, and our tour will be led by a senior National Park Service historian, Dr Harry Butowsky. The tour will focus on the aircraft of World War II on display in the museum, including perhaps the war’s most famous single airplace, the B-29 Enola Gay. The museum is free, but parking is $12 per car. I believe parking is free after 4:30pm (the museum closes at 5:30pm), so I will—with you approval—schedule us for a 4:45-5:30 timeframe. We’ll discuss this in class and you will receive extra credit for attending. You’ll find information about the museum at

www.nasm.si.edu/museum/udvarhazy

APRIL 14

The recent past; the year 1968; making sense of the present: the Long Boom and Clash of Civilizations back to Schedule

READ: textbook chapters 31, 33, 34

http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/dept/PS/Finley/PS425/reading/Huntington1.html

http://www2.coloradocollege.edu/dept/ps/finley/ps425/reading/huntington2.html

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,577981,00.html

www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom.html

APRIL 21 and APRIL 28

Small group reports in class

MAY 5

Final assignments due in Humanities Ofc (room LC304) at 12 noon today

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