Gregory Shaya

Come join the information session on Thursday if you’d like to learn more about this spring-summer course on documentary filmmaking & history in Buenos Aires.

Info Session: Thursday, October 21 at 11am in A […]

Test post!!!

This is the course website for History 301: The World in 1900! As you can see, it is still very much under construction. But stay tuned. We’ll be filling in details all semester.

We’ll also be using Moodle for […]

Well, I know we still have one more presentation to watch, but I thought I’d offer a couple quick comments about the whole idea.

As professors, faculty members are often critical of the idea that we should be […]

It seems that everyday I open the paper there is some bit of news or commentary that calls to mind the history we’ve been studying. Here’s one from this past week.

You’ve all surely heard the news about the […]

Alright, well, it was officially over when the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. That marked the end of hostilities. The peace treaties of 1919, such as the Versailles Treaty, promised an accounting of […]

The Battle of the Somme has become a symbol of the destructive power of the First World War. The offensive, begun on the first of July, 1916, was to be the Big Push that would end the war. Instead it was a […]

We’ve given some close attention to the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century, which is typically dated from the 1880s (the  Berlin Conference of 1884 was an important turning point) down to the […]

There’s so much to say about the late nineteenth century I don’t know where to begin. Let me just lay out a few questions that we can talk about this week.

First, a look back at Friday: did my reading of […]

Walter Benjamin offered that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the very same time a document of barbarism.” Writing in 1940 and in Paris, where the German-Jewish writer had fled the Nazis, […]

This week we’ve begun to contemplate the upheaval in world history that has come to be known as the industrial revolution, the transformation from an agrarian, handicraft economy to an industrial economy that […]

The French Revolution is one of those world historical events that will be forever studied, forever argued over. Today I gave you just a glimpse of its meaning and complexity.

If you want to explore a bit […]

For a bit of extra credit, I invite you to watch this documentary film on Thursday night and offer a few comments to the class. The film, “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” will be shown on T […]

https://youtu.be/cj0qASES6Uo

If you find yourself studying abroad in Tuscany in the near future, be sure to wander through the renovated (and newly named) Museo Galileo, the museum of science in Florence, Italy, where you can check out […]

I also wanted to share this clip from a film on Louis XIV by Roberto Rossellini, the great Italian director. In his youth, the monarchy was beset by challenges — from provincial nobles, from the urban law […]

The kinds of resources available on the web — some scholarly, some entertaining, some put together by academics, some by amateurs — is overwhelming. I’ll try to point out a few interesting sites as we go […]

You can’t understand the 16th c. and the Protestant Reformation without understanding a thing or two about John Calvin (1509-1564). Born in France, trained as a lawyer, rooted in European humanism, Calvin made a […]