Humanities

With its walls razed to ground by Babylon’s armies, Jerusalem joined a long line of ancient vanquished cities—from Ur and Nineveh and Persepolis to Babylon itself. While some recovered from the destruction, others did not. But none responded to political catastrophe by fashioning the kind of elaborate and [...]

本課程之教學內容以希臘哲學之發展為主，並輔以哲學對人生意義之說明。希臘哲學是西洋哲學的骨幹，呈現西方人思維的核心理念，不但足以解釋今日之西方世界，甚至可以說明全世界的發展趨勢。本課程以希臘哲學為教學之主幹，分為先蘇哲學、詭辯學派、蘇格拉底、柏拉圖、亞理斯多德五個階段。教學的方式以強調他們之間的不同與相同的部分。課程將以演講的方式進行，揉合日常經驗作說明，並不時地會以整體的角度回頭看希臘哲學在今日哲學與社會所扮演的角色。

This course will review the emergence of the modern Middle East from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of the First World War to the present. We will discuss the Ottoman legacy in the region and the Western imperial impact on the creation of the Arab [...]

Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.

The destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile were a great catastrophe in the history of the Jewish Nation. What really happened during that dark, fateful age, and how did new opportunities arise from the ashes?

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you [...]

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it? Models. Evidence shows that people who think with [...]

This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.

Most countries are getting more and more unequal. But the core of democracy is political equality: that everyone should have an equal say in how their country is run. Can we really expect these things to go together? Can people have equal political power while economic inequality grows and [...]