Objectives

This course will take you through huge chunks of human history from the Paleolithic era through the Vietnam War and into our postmodern world. Your course project will culminate in an eight-ten page paper. Your research paper will require a minimum of five academic-scholarly sources. Both in-text citation and an end reference page as specified by the APA style sheet are required. Scrupulous documentation plus high originality, analysis, insight, and fresh applications of ideas are highly prized. Mere reporting, describing, and finding others’ ideas are discouraged, and plagiarism is grounds for failure. Your paper is to be 70-80% original and 20-30% resourced (documented via turnitin.com). Details and milestones follow.

Suggested Topics of Investigation

Here are suggested topics, which you may elect to use or not use. If you wish to work outside of these suggestions, be sure to clear your project with your professor.

· Compare and contrast society during the early Renaissance in Europe to contemporary society

· Compare and contrast human understanding of the nature of revenge prior to and after the creation of Hamlet

· Analyze the themes, imagery or interpretation of The Waste Land and describe how one or more of these are found in contemporary society

· Evaluate the work of Artemisia Gentileschi Renaissance Artist and interpret why she is considered an early feminist

· Analyze views of women’s reproductive solutions in the 19th Century and interpret their historical and contemporary impact.

· Distinguish the essential differences between the major thought of Plato and Aristotle and use the information to illustrate the impact of philosophy on contemporary views on a given them (life, freedom, power, equality, and more)

· Examine views of warfare and battle throughout the ages and provide an interpretation that explains the evolution of the faceless war

· Analyze the impact of the Industrial Age and the rise of capitalism and discuss the key features of both and their influence on contemporary society

· Investigate the history of slavery and discuss the ways in which this history impacts contemporary society