Since it's founding in 1795 Union College has been the home of many creative and inventive professors and students.  In this course students will conduct research on Union innovators and their innovations.  In the first part of the course students will investigate how different disciplines define innovation, what characteristics innovators typically share, and what conditions are necessary to stimulate innovation.  Students will then work in teams to identify major innovations that have come from the Union community and how these innovations have affected the rest of the world.  In the second half of the term each student will pick one innovation and/or one innovator as the subject of his or her research paper.

The 1979-80 Iran hostage crisis, in which Iranian university students held U.S. citizens in captivity for 444 days inside the American embassy in Tehran, has left an indelible mark on U.S.-Iranian relations.  In this course we will study the economic, political, cultural, historical, and other factors that have shaped today's Iran.  We will take, as our point of departure, one of the most important events in modern Iranian history:  The CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953.  We will study this event, and the subsequent 25 years of repression and de-democratization, in the context of Iran's anti-colonial struggles and modernization efforts of the previous 150 years or so.  This approach will illuminate the genesis of the 1979 revolution, and the hostage crisis, and the evolution of the Islamic Republic since then.

The goal is to enable students to contextualize, and thus better understand, current issues such as the role of petroleum and nuclear energy in Iran's political economy and in its relationship with the rest of the world, the role of Islam in Iran, the position of women in society, and related issues.  In this journey, students will develop an appreciation of Iran as a complex, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, modern, vibrant society with an ancient history and a rich cultural heritage.

This research seminar investigates how technology can change the human body and mind by surrounding us with a digitized, multimedia culture -- a cyberculture.  Specific issues related to the impact of technology on human knowledge, on the modes of communication and on human relationships will be debated to bring out the controversial aspects of our high tech future.

Because the seminar focuses on technology, it will make use of the college's digital technology resource -- specifically, a computerized classroom, online scholarly resources, and hypertext writing software.  Our seminar meets in one of the most technologically advanced classrooms on campus, allowing us to view websites, videos and blogs while in class.  We will also be posting all student research and writing onto a class blog for viewing by all members of the class.  Instead of writing traditional academic papers on paper, students will be writing their term papers as hypertext, using special software that opens windows and creates links, resulting in multiple reading pathways through the term paper and a more complex scholarly structure.  These hypertext term papers can also make creative use of graphics, videos, audio files and other computer features available for expression of one's ideas.  The hypertext term paper will be structured as a philosophical argument, written in three drafts, that is posted online for other students to read and critique.

This course will explore the history of European colonial rule in Africa from the period of exploration and conquest during the 19th century to the era of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s.  The course will explore different interpretations of imperialism and colonialism, through a careful examination of case studies drawn from diverse colonial contexts.  Topics will include technology and empire, colonial warfare, colonial occupation and African resistance, colonial government and economics, and religious and cultural change under colonialism.  The central questions for the course will be:  How and why did Africans lose control over their lands following the wars of conquest?  What impact did European colonialism have on Africa?  How did colonial states manage to stay in power?

The course will be structured as a seminar, which means the focus will be on the discussion of readings.  Furthermore, we will spend considerable time focused on student research projects.

Does a man who catches a man in bed with his wife have the right to kill him?  When does a creditor have the right to enter his debtor's house and seize his property?  Should a man who fled his city at a time of war be considered a traitor?  These are some of the questions Athenian juries were asked to decide--without the benefit of trained lawyers and judges.  Many lawcourt speeches survive from ancient Athens, and they can teach us much about Athenian values and society.  Students will learn to analyze these rich primary sources, and will use them, along with select secondary literature, to research the society that created them.

Technology, Mind and Media

This research seminar investigates how technology can change the human body and mind by surrounding us with a digitized, multimedia culture -- a cyberculture.  Specific issues related to the impact of technology on human knowledge, on the modes of communication and on human relationships will be debated to bring out the controversial aspects of our high tech future.

Because the seminar focuses on technology, it will make use of the college's digital technology resource -- specifically, a computerized classroom, online scholarly resources, and hypertext writing software.  Our seminar meets in one of the most technologically advanced classrooms on campus, allowing us to view websites, videos and blogs while in class.  We will also be posting all student research and writing onto a class blog for viewing by all members of the class.  Instead of writing traditional academic papers on paper, students will be writing their term papers as hypertext, using special software that opens windows and creates links, resulting in multiple reading pathways through the term paper and a more complex scholarly structure.  These hypertext term papers can also make creative use of graphics, videos, audio files and other computer features available for expression of one's ideas.  The hypertext term paper will be structured as a philosophical argument, written in three drafts, that is posted online for other students to read and critique. 

Until the mid-1800s, the speed of communication was the about same as the speed of the transport of goods; sending someone a message involved moving a letter or a messenger from one place to another.  Beginning with the telegraph, and continuing with telephones, radio, email, cell phones and instant messaging, we have developed and become accustomed to the ability to contact each other almost instantaneously, anywhere, and at any time.  This course will explore both how this technology works as well as how it has affected our lives and the organization of our society.  The technology will be studied in order to understand issues such as why some types of communication are easy or cheap while others are hard or expensive, and why privacy is more of a concern with some types of communication than with others. 

In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, 19 people were hung and one man was pressed to death under a pile of stones, all accused, and some convicted, of practicing witchcraft.  We will examine a number of interpretations offered by scholars in the past about what happened at Salem and why.  Research projects will make use of a variety of sources either to test these explanations or to offer some new approach to the complexities of the topic.

This course will examine slavery in the United States with a focus on the 19th century.  In the first half of the course students will read some of the classic works on slavery in order to familiarize themselves with how historians have talked about slavery to this point.  They will then spend the second half of the course researching and writing a term paper based on primary sources (newspapers, slave narratives, etc.).  Specifically, students will be asked  to develop a thesis based on this primary research addressing the topic of slave resistance.  They are to not only develop an original argument, but also situate this argument within the existing literature on the topic.

Three years after the US Census Department announced that a fixed line demarcating the American frontier could no longer be drawn, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  For Turner, the existence of the frontier had defined the rugged independence of the American individual, i.e., self-reliant, optimistic, adaptable, and ingenious.  Furthermore, he warned that with the loss of the frontier the nation required a new means of defining American character.

Concurrent with this development, the last decades of the 19th century witnessed an explosion of interest in sports.  Long distained, especially by those who held Victorian values, athletic activity and sports developed during this period into an important institution with a vital social purpose in American life.  In particular urban, middle-class men and women envisioned sport as an activity that taught the values fundamental to American identity, the values of a frontier society, the values of the rugged individual, of free enterprise, of community, of adaptability, of creativity, and of success.  The intertwining of sport and American identity (whether by class, gender, ethnicity, or race) only deepened during the whole of the 20th century.

The linkage of sport to the development of the distinctive traits often associated with American identity can be researched from a variety of perspectives.  In addition to the expansion and acceptance of particular sports (perhaps especially professional baseball and college football) as well as the lives of late 19th and 20th century sports heroes and personalities, social reformers, business executives, and political leaders embraced and popularized this relationship.

Historians have long recognized that the peoples of Britain had a massive curiosity about the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.  In some cases the curiosity was just that, simple curiosity.  At other times curiosity served the interests of commerce, conquest, and colonization -- in other words, curiosity was central to the creation and expansion of the British Empire.  In all of these cases, British writers produced a fascinating and diverse array of books describing the peoples whom they encountered. Students in this seminar will study books within the genre of "discovery literature" printed between 1500 and 1800.  Students will analyze the authors, interrogate how their works constructed non-Europeans, and assess the impact of those works on British perceptions of and relationships with peoples around the globe.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf coast and New Orleans, Louisiana.  For weeks after, the popular media framed the almost total failure of institutions to adequately respond to the disaster and raised stark questions about the role of race and class.  And, New Orleans' history of 'social problems' were painted in ugly terms.  Katrina was a social as well as a natural disaster.

Since then, social scientists have been studying the many issues raised by these events and some good studies are now becoming available.  In this seminar, we will attempt to 'unpack' the Katrina disaster by examining this research and by doing some of our own.  We will use content analysis techniques to examine media representations of the disaster, documenting their key themes.  Then we will ask what social science can tell us about the adequacy of these media images:  What, after all, is a disaster?  How do people usually react to disasters?  How do social scientists study such fluid social phenomena?  What are the ethics of studying people in crisis situations?  How does the existing social structure of a community make it more or less vulnerable to disaster?  What issues do relief activities raise? What do we know so far about how these issues played out in New Orleans before, during and after Katrina?  Each student will research and write a paper on a specific issue concerning the hurricane's impact.

Politics, Civil War and the Fall of the Roman Republic

HBO�s Rome has introduced many students to the complex issues involving the last days of Rome�s Republic -- political intrigues, military expansion, personal animosities and all types of corruption.  Figures like Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Marc Antony and Cleopatra walked the world stage and changed the course of history with a single act.  But how accurate is Rome?  The last decades of the Roman Republic are some of the most wealthily documented from the ancient world.  From the period itself we have histories, private letters, political pamphlets, speeches, great works of literature and political philosophies.  How historians make use of this material, however, is not always clear.  All of the sources have political and personal biases and any histories we construct using them must be aware of these biases.  But more often than not, the use we make of the ancient sources depends on our own biases and desires.  When HBO reconstructs ancient Rome, it does so to entertain and accuracy is sometimes an unwelcome bedfellow.  The task of the ancient historian, then, is to learn to distinguish not only ancient biases but our own.

This course will introduce students to the tasks of the ancient historian in reconstructing and debating the major issues that contributed to the end of the Roman Republic through a study of a wide variety of source material.  Students will read historical accounts by contemporary figures like Caesar and Sallust, political speeches and letters by Cicero as well as later interpretations of the Civil Wars and its participants by Lucan and Plutarch along side of modern scholarship.  Our goals will include learning how to think critically about each source and how to integrate different types of source material into thinking and writing about the complicated and fascinating history of the Roman Republic.

Arguably no people in the world are more in love with their cars than Americans.  Certainly no country's real estate, livelihood, and life have been more reshaped by the automobile than those of the United States, in the course of little more than a century.  Our seminar will consider when, how, and why the automobile came to so dominate our society and examine a few critiques of that dominance.  Because the ascendance of the automobile affected so many aspects of American society, common readings and class discussions will use highly varied readings to cover highly varied topics -- the changing science and engineering of cars, the economics of the industry, the rise of mass production and later niche marketing, design and aesthetics, the reshaping of urban and rural landscapes and life, the changing politics of transportation, the rise of General Motors and other large companies, views of the auto by its critics and by mainstream media, and others.  Each student will start from these readings and work with the instructor to find a topic for which the 12-18 page research paper is feasible and relevant.  Each student will make a brief report on his or her topic around the fourth week of the term and lead a discussion in class based on the first complete draft of the paper sometime during the last three weeks.

The focus of the course is the history of Cuba from the 1959 triumph of a revolution led by Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement, through the several decade-long period in which Cuba was the site of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, and into the current decades since the end of the Cold War and emergence of Cuba as an influential, non-aligned socialist state.  The course will examine changes within Cuba in revolutionary ideology, problems of scarcity and tensions among different sectors of Cuban society, gender and race relations, economic and political relations with the US, Latin America, and the rest of the world.

Seminar participants will present at least one oral report in class, based on an assigned reading, will write a research paper based on both primary and secondary sources, and will be expected to participate actively in evaluating the work of their classmates and in revising their own work based on suggestions from others in the class.