Mr Lehmann
1. What is history and why should we do it? Compare the views of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Chodorow et al, and your fellow students.
2. Is the Neolithic Revolution properly termed a revolution? Why? Isn't the invention of civilization more important?
3. Compare the religions of the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Hebrews. Why has the Hebrew religion alone survived? Evaluate your instructor's emphasis on the prophets' role in the survival of Hebrew religion.
4. "The history of civilization depends first on the history of toolmaking." Evaluate this assertion, taking "toolmaking" to include tools for thinking and communicating as well as for making and manipulating.
l. Why was Homeric epic so important for the Greeks? Why for us?
2. What is the polis? Describe thoroughly its political, social, religious, and economic characteristics by comparing the Homeric cities, Sparta, and Athens.
3. Describe the rise of Athens as an imperial state in the fifth century and the reasons for its failure in the Peloponnesian War.
4. How did the Greek political world differ in the fourth century from the fifth? What did Alexander aim for and what did he accomplish?
l. Be able to describe the Roman constitution during the Republic. Go behind the constitution and locate the real center of political power by analyzing Roman society and its values (the mos maiorum).
2. Explain how the Romans wanted to conquer the world and how they did so.
3. What caused the breakdown of the Republic in the first century BC. How did Augustus resolve its problems?
4. Why did Romans persecute Christians and why did Christianity survive? Did Constantine's conversion affect the success of Christianity?
5. Did the Roman Empire decline and fall? Why?
l. Compare the civilizations of Byzantium and Western Christianity in the Middle Ages by focusing on two or three especially distinctive features.
2. Account for the rapid success and expansion of Islam. How did its presence on the borders of Christian Europe affect Western Civilization in the medieval period?
3. Describe medieval feudalism and account for its decline.
4. Voltaire said that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. Why did he say this?
5. Describe in general terms the history of church-state relations throughout the
Middle Ages.
1. What is humanism? Why did it emerge first in Italy? How did it influence the Reformation?
2. What abuses within the Church did the reformers object to? What, in particular, was Martin Luther's problem with the Church? What were his solutions for ecclesiastical shortcomings and his own spiritual struggles? What is solfidianism?
3. What is the significance of the Peace of Augsburg? the Edict of Nantes? the Peace of Westphalia? Evaluate the political as well as religious factors in the events leading to these treaties.
4. What factors led to the voyages of discovery? How did the Spanish establish
their empire in the Americas given the rivalry with other European states and the
existence of native states.
Precatio quidem potior. . .at scientia non minus necessaria tamen.
--Erasmus, Enchiridion
1. Explain absolutism by reference to political theorists such as Hobbes and Bossuet and to the policies of kings and ministers. Compare the absolutism of the seventeenth century with enlightened absolutism of the eighteenth.
2. Show how the European states of the eighteenth century strove to balance each other's military powers. What forces threatened balance? How did diplomacy and warfare redress imbalance?
3. Did the Enlightenment depend more on the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution or Europeans' experience of absolutism and English parliamentarianism?
1. Briefly compare the French and American revolutions in terms of their origins and the role of violence in each one. Contrast the ideas of republicanism and the "despotism of liberty."
2. Explain how Napoleon came to power, his success, and his failure.
3. What were the social and intellectual consequences of the industrial revolution?
1. Show how conservatism, liberalism, and nationalism influenced the events in Europe of 1848. This will be a substantial essay and the only one for part 9.
1. What are the characteristics of the Victorian Age as they appear throughout Europe and North America?
2. Explain Bismarck's alliance system and the reasons for its failure.
3. Why did World War I turn into a war of attrition? How was the stalemate broken?
4. How did World War I affect events in Russia?
1. Why did totalitarianism become such a characteristic feature of the early and middle twentieth century?
2. Explain the shift from a multi-polar to a bi-polar world in the early and middle twentieth century. Describe the changes in superpower diplomacy from the forties to the eighties.
3. Compare the wars in Korea and Vietnam.