World History, Culture and Geography: The Modern World
The modern world from the 1900's to the present, including the two world wars, the rise of democratic ideas and international relations.
- The similarities and differences in Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman views of law, reason and faith and duties of the individual
- The development of the Western political ideas of the rule of law and illegitimacy of tyranny, using selections from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics
- The influence of the U.S. Constitution on political systems in the contemporary world
10.2 A COMPARISON OF THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION OF ENGLAND, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THEIR ENDURING EFFECTS WORLDWIDE ON THE POLITICAL EXPECTATIONS FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY
- A comparison of the ideas of major philosophers and their effects on the democratic revolutions in England, the U.S., France and Latin America (e.g., John Locke, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison)
- The principles of the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights (1689), the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) and the U.S. Bill of Rights (1791)
- The unique character of the American Revolution, its spread to other parts of the world and its continuing significance to other nations
- How the ideologu of the French Revolution led France to develop from constitutional monarchy to democratic despotism to the Napoleonic empire
- How nationalism spread across Europe with Napoleon but was repressed for a generation under the Congress of Vienna and Concert of Europe until the Revolutions of 1848
10.3 THE EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, JAPAN AND THE U.S.
- Why England was the first country to industrialize
- How scientific and technologocial changes and new forms of energy brought about massive social, economic and cultural change (e.g., the inventions and discoveries of James Watt, Eli Whitney, Henry Bessemer, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison)
- The growth of population, rural to urban migration and growth of cities associated with the Indistrial Revolution
- The evolution of work and labor, including the demise of the slave trade and the effects of immigration, mining and manufacturing, division of labor and the union movement
- The connections among natural resources, entrepreneurship, labor and capital in an industrial economy
- The emergence of capitalism as a dominant economic pattern and the responses to it, including Utopianism, Social Democracy, Socialism and Communism
- The emergence of Romanticism in art and literature (e.g., the poetry of William Blake and William Wordsworth), social criticism (e.g., the novels of Charles Dickens) and the move away from Classicism in Europe
10.4 PATTERNS OF GLOBAL CHANGE IN THE ERA OF NEW IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA, SOUTHEAST ASIA, CHINA, INDIA, LATIN AMERICA AND THE PHILIPPINES
- The rise of industrial economies and their link to imperialism and colonialism (e.g., the role played by national security and strategic advantage; moral issues raised by the search for national hegemony, Social Darwinism, and the missionary impulse; material issues such as land, resources and technology
- The locations of the colonial rule of such nations as England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Portugal and the U.S.
- Imperialism from the perspectice of the colonizers and the colonized and the varied immediate and long-term responses by the people under colonial rule
- The independence struggles of the colonized regions of the world, including the roles of leaders, such as Sun Yat-sen in China and the roles of ideology and religion
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