Courses tagged with "Fine Arts" (252)

This subject examines the experiences of ordinary Chinese people as they lived through the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We look at personal narratives, primary sources, films alongside a textbook to think about how individual and family lives connect with the broader processes of change in modern China. In the readings and discussions, you should focus on how major political events have an impact on the characters' daily lives, and how the decisions they make cause large-scale social transformation.

This subject examines the experiences of ordinary Chinese people as they lived through the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We look at personal narratives, primary sources, films alongside a textbook to think about how individual and family lives connect with the broader processes of change in modern China. In the readings and discussions, you should focus on how major political events have an impact on the characters' daily lives, and how the decisions they make cause large-scale social transformation.

This subject examines the experiences of ordinary Chinese people as they lived through the tumultuous changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We look at personal narratives, primary sources, films alongside a textbook to think about how individual and family lives connect with the broader processes of change in modern China. In the readings and discussions, you should focus on how major political events have an impact on the characters' daily lives, and how the decisions they make cause large-scale social transformation.

This course, produced with The Great Courses, will look at four key themes in the History of America as presented by Dr. Richard Kurin, Undersecretary for History, Art and Culture at the Smithsonian.

• American Icons – from the Star Spangled Banner to the Statue of Liberty – how have these become iconic symbols for Americans?  What do these icons represent in a global context?
• Rights and Liberties – from the Declaration of Independence to the Greensboro Lunch Counter, how have Americans defined, and continue to define, their rights and governance?
• America the Beautiful – From evidence of the continent’s first inhabitants to the conservation efforts of the Smithsonian’s scientists, how have the American people – both native and settler – envisioned, explored, worked and protected the land and its resources?
• Spirit of Invention – from the Model T to the space program, how have America’s pioneering inventions changed the world?

In this course you will gain a unique perspective on American history and culture by learning the stories behind objects that were, and continue to be, an essential part of U.S. history. Most importantly, you will reflect on what objects have personal meaning to you, and the role that symbolic objects play in your own histories.

This course is adapted from the video lecture series produced by Smithsonian and The Great Courses, Experiencing America: A Smithsonian Tour Through History.

This course explores the political and historical evolution of the Soviet state and society from the 1917 Revolution to the present. It covers the creation of a revolutionary regime, causes and nature of the Stalin revolution, post-Stalinist efforts to achieve political and social reform, and causes of the Soviet collapse. It also examines current developments in Russia in light of Soviet history.

Have you ever wondered about how museum, library, and other kinds of historical or scientific  collections all come together? Or how and why curators, historians, archivists, and preservationists do what they do?

In Tangible Things, you will discover how material objects have shaped academic disciplines and reinforced or challenged boundaries between people. This course will draw on some of the most fascinating items housed at Harvard University, highlighting several to give you a sense of the power of learning through tangible things.

By “stepping onto” the storied campus, you and your fellow learners can explore Harvard’s astonishing array of tangible things—books and manuscripts, art works, scientific specimens, ethnographic artifacts, and historical relics of all sorts. The University not only owns a Gutenberg bible, but it also houses in its collections Turkish sun dials, a Chinese crystal ball, a divination basket from Angola, and nineteenth-century “spirit writing” chalked on a child-sized slate. Tucked away in storage cabinets or hidden in closets and the backrooms of its museums and libraries are Henry David Thoreau’s pencil, a life mask of Abraham Lincoln, and chemicals captured from a Confederate ship. The Art Museums not only care for masterpieces of Renaissance painting but also for a silver-encrusted cup made from a coconut. The Natural History Museum not only preserves dinosaur bones and a fish robot but an intact Mexican tortilla more than a century old.

In the first section of the course, we will consider how a statue, a fish, and a gingham gown have contributed to Harvard’s history, and you will learn the value of stopping to look at the things around you.

In the next section, we will explore some of the ways people have brought things together into purposeful collections to preserve memory, promote commerce, and define culture.

Finally, we will consider methods of rearranging objects to create new ways of thinking about nature, time, and ordinary work.

Along the way, you will discover new ways of looking at, organizing, and interpreting tangible things in your own environment.

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How can you help your students to see history as a living, breathing record of the past? How can you motivate students to ask probing questions and seek complex answers? How can you bridge their historical knowledge with a lifelong commitment to civic action?

With this self-paced course, middle and high school teachers will find new ways to engage students in and out of the classroom. Co-taught by Dr. Kathy Swan, Professor of Education at the University of Kentucky, and Naomi Coquillon, Manager of Youth and Teacher Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, this self-paced course will offer teachers useful and readily applicable strategies and tactics to incorporate inquiry-based learning methods into their existing history lessons.

The self-paced course brings together the new College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies with the Smithsonian’s hands-on, museum-based educational techniques that bring historical artifacts to life for millions of visitors each year. Through explanation, demonstration, and dynamic examples, the course offers teachers practical ideas for how to entice students to craft complex and incisive questions; think critically about primary and secondary historical sources; form and support their opinions with evidence; and communicate their conclusions in ways that will prepare them to be engaged citizens of the world. Demonstrations will feature the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s exhibitions and vast collection of historical artifacts and will offer ideas and resources to help teachers everywhere incorporate object- and inquiry-based teaching techniques and Smithsonian online resources into their own classrooms.

This seminar examines the global history of the last millennium, including technological change, commodity exchange, systems of production, and economic growth. Students engage with economic history, medieval and early modern origins of modern systems of production, consumption and global exchange. Topics include the long pre-history of modern economic development; medieval world systems; the age of discovery; the global crisis of the 17^th century; demographic systems; global population movements; the industrial revolution; the rise of the modern consumer; colonialism and empire building; patterns of inequality, within and across states; the curse of natural resources fate of Africa; and the threat of climate change to modern economic systems. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.

Terrorism has gone from a persistent yet marginal security concern to one of the most important security problems of our day. There are few countries that do not suffer from some form of terrorism. Though many attempts at terrorism fail, some groups wage lengthy and bloody campaigns and, in exceptional cases, kill hundreds or even thousands in pursuit of their ends.

This course on terrorism will explore the nuances involved in defining terrorism, the nature of Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Islamic State, and other important groups, the effectiveness of different counterterrorism tools, terrorist recruiting, counterterrorism and the rule of law, the political context in South Asia and the Middle East, and the terrorist use of technology.

For those interested in an abbreviated version of this course, the 3-section course Terrorism and Counterterrorism: An Introduction is available here.

Terrorism has gone from a persistent yet marginal security concern to one of the most important security problems of our day. There are few countries that do not suffer from some form of terrorism. Though many attempts at terrorism fail, some groups wage lengthy and bloody campaigns and, in exceptional cases, kill hundreds or even thousands in pursuit of their ends.

This course on terrorism will explore the nuances involved in defining terrorism, the nature of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other important groups, the effectiveness of different counterterrorism tools, terrorist recruiting, counterterrorism and the rule of law, the political context in the Middle East, and the terrorist use of technology.

For those interested in a more extended version of the course, the full 7-section course Terrorism and Counterterrorism is available here.

This course asks students to consider the ways in which social theorists, institutional reformers, and political revolutionaries in the 17th through 19th centuries seized upon insights developed in the natural sciences and mathematics to change themselves and the society in which they lived. Students study trials, art, literature and music to understand developments in Europe and its colonies in these two centuries. Covers works by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Darwin.