Renaissance

This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part Two begins early in the twentieth century, as older ways of doing things and habits of thought give way. What follows is an era of cataclysmic struggles over what ideas and institutions will take their place.

This is a course about the history of Skepticism from the ancient Greeks to today, with special attention to the political ramifications of questioning man's ability to know the world and himself with any certainty. We will discuss the debates raging between Plato and the Sophists, the rise of [...]

Learn how the art, architecture, and urban form of Renaissance and Baroque Rome projected the city’s image of itself to its citizens and the world. We can read a city in a number of ways: in its plan, in the buildings that make its streets and public spaces, in [...]

As most famously defined by F. O. Matthiessen in his groundbreaking book, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), the “American Renaissance” demarcates a period of tremendous literary activity between the 1830s and 1860s that marked the cultivation, for the first time, [...]

At the outset of the 16th century, Europeans tended to dismiss English literature as inferior to continental literary traditions; the educated Englishman was obliged to travel to the continent and speak in other languages in order to “culture” himself. By the end of the Renaissance, however, some of [...]