This lecture defines the perspective of the course, including what we will call the Enlightenment Project—the adoption of liberal, democratic, rationalist principles in much of the world—while emphasizing the unresolved nature of the struggle.
This lecture analyzes why most historians see World War I as the real beginning of the 20th century and why it had such a destabilizing impact on the existing world order.
A complex peace settlement embodies and feeds the contradictions of an uncertain world order, helping to set the stage for political challenges from inside and outside Europe.
This lecture begins to examine the "crisis of meaning" articulated by a generation of European artists and intellectuals, focusing on two influential thinkers, Nietzsche and Freud.
Building on the intellectual foundations of Nietzsche and Freud, avant-garde artists turn isolated ideas into a popular movement, expressed by the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Futurists.
This lecture examines the anxieties about gender roles and looks at the variety of solutions offered by liberal feminists and communists.
The identity crisis exemplified by the debates over the "woman question" take a different form in anxieties raised by an emerging "mass society." We examine the phenomenon's paradoxical roots in the evolution of liberal democracy and capitalism in Western society.
This lecture defines the nature of mass society and how it functioned, emphasizing the pessimistic views articulated by the Frankfurt school of German philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brings into question the economic system of capitalism and the liberal principles that brought prosperity to Europe and the West.
This lecture explores how the theories of Marx were adapted by Lenin and begins a discussion of communism and fascism as serious political challenges to liberal democracy.
We look at the fascist platform and at who joined the movement, and examine why it appeared at this moment in history.
The Russian Revolution provides the first opportunity for a communist movement to take power. This lecture analyzes why this happened and the revolution's symbolic meaning to the rest of the world.
Some scholars have argued that fascism and communism, though different in theory, create similar totalitarian regimes in practice. This lecture looks at Nazi Germany's unique combining of mass mobilization and dictatorial power.
While the Nazis were master manipulators of the tools of mass society, Stalin and his party use consent and terror to create mass society in an underdeveloped country.
We shift our focus to challenges to the West's political and moral leadership, beginning with the impact of Western imperialism on China and its role in shaping the 1911 revolution.
In this lecture, we follow the two major strands of Chinese nationalism—the liberal Nationalists of Sun Yat Sen, and the communists led by Mao Tse-tung.
This lecture introduces the Indian model of nonviolent anti-imperialism and examines the legacy of India's imperialist experience.
We follow the nationalist movement from its origins in the late 19th century to independence in 1947, including the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and his role in Indian nationalism.
This lecture explores the legacy of imperialism and ends with a summary of the social, cultural, and economic problems that provoked a revolution a century after formal independence.
As in China, the Mexican revolution is a struggle for control between different nationalist visions. This lecture argues that the eventual settlement of the revolution was an attempt at compromise.
Japan provides a nearly unique instance of a non-Western country that resists Western imperialism and follows an independent path to economic and political modernization and empowerment.
This lecture explains how Japan becomes the first non-Western country to compete directly with the Western powers in the imperial arena and explores how this leads to war.
While the Pacific war is partly an extension of the struggle against fascism, it is also a battle over the imperialist world order—with race a fundamental element.
We follow the course of the war and analyze why Germany and its allies lost, moving on to the outlines of an emerging fascist world in German occupation policies.
This lecture describes the "final solution" and considers the broader international failure to stop the genocide as a culmination of the post-WWI "crisis of meaning."
This lecture examines the Existentialist movement's bleak but dignified way for individuals to survive in a post-Auschwitz world.
This lecture discusses how the Cold War emerged out of WWII, including American and Soviet perspectives on the question of responsibility.
This lecture considers the impact of the Cold War on American domestic and foreign policy, including a discussion of McCarthyism and its implications.
With the Manhattan Project, massive federal funding, monopolization, and the channeling of research into government projects create a new relationship between the state and private industry.
This lecture compares and contrasts the northern European welfare state and the American model constructed on the foundations of Roosevelt's New Deal.
This lecture introduces the phenomenon of decolonization that began in the first decades after World War II, including its symbolic importance in creating what became known as the third world.
We examine the problems faced by postcolonial nations: economic dependence, poverty, debates over neocolonialism, conflicts provoked by diversity, lack of an experienced political elite, and the influence of Cold War politics.
This lecture charts the evolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and examines the broader issues of competing nationalist claims and the problematic collision of nationalism, ethnic and religious diversity, and democracy.
In this lecture we begin to look at different roads to development, using case studies to compare and contrast their successes and failures.
Because China and India began the process of development with similar problems, they provide ideal points of comparison. This lecture uses India as an example of the capitalist democratic model in the third world.
This lecture examines the hybrid model used to achieve Japan's spectacular prosperity, a model that has taken elements from both the classic liberal and communist approaches to development.
This lecture analyzes the adoption of Japan's "soft authoritarianism" by a variety of neighboring countries and speculates on the general applicability of the Japanese model in the third world.
Latin American countries have attempted many paths in their efforts to resolve long-standing economic and social problems. This lecture surveys those efforts and evaluates the prospects for democracy.
Africa's political and economic problems have seemed intractable. The lecture begins with a general consideration of the lack of measurable progress.
Scholars still debate the endemic versus colonialist roots of third-world problems. This lecture delves into the Nigerian case as a way to understand and evaluate this debate.
This lecture examines the challenge to racial discrimination in the United States.
This lecture analyzes movements in the United States, Western Europe, and elsewhere, with a focus on the mobilization of American students against the Vietnam War and the phenomenon of the counterculture.
This lecture discusses the origins and goals of contemporary feminism with a broad global perspective that acknowledges the many types of women's movements.
This lecture introduces the roots of fundamentalism as a global movement and the nature of its challenge to the secularism of both Western democratic and communist systems before narrowing its focus to Islamic fundamentalism.
We analyze the long-term crisis within communist society and the various failed attempts at reform, from Khrushchev to Dubcek, and, finally, to Gorbachev.
This lecture argues that the final victory of Western liberal democracy has not yet been achieved and examines the parameters of the post-Cold War world, analyzing the complex prospects for democracy around the globe.
In the post-Cold War world, the prospects for democracy rest not only on the health of individual nations but on the increasingly complex interdependence that has been labeled globalization.
Despite the end of the Cold War, the "new world order" has yet to coalesce. We use the 2003 war in Iraq to discuss the dramatically different visions of the new world order that have emerged for the 21st century.