by distinguished faculty members working closely with
our skilled instructional technology staff. Three to five hours in length,
these in-depth multimedia e-seminars are free to Columbia students, faculty,
and staff.
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| | Randall Balmer | | Since the 1960s, the religious landscape of the United States has undergone striking changes. In recent decades, we have become the most religiously diverse nation on earth. Despite the American ideal of protecting religious diversity, these developments have challenged and disturbed many Americans. In this e-seminar Randall Balmer provides a larger historical context in which to consider the tension between religious conformity and religious diversity in our nation.
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| | Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer | | In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the doctors at the front lines witnessed a sudden massacre and struggled to treat against an agent they didn't understand. What impact did this experience have on these doctors, and how did this first group of caregivers shape the evolution of the epidemic? To construct a collective biography of the early AIDS doctors, Ronald Bayer, Columbia University professor of public health, and Gerald Oppenheimer, associate professor of clinical public health, turned to oral history. In these two e-seminars, Professors Bayer and Oppenheimer discuss the development of the oral history project from inspiration to publication.
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| | Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer | | In the first of two e-seminars on their oral history of the AIDS epidemic, Professors Bayer and Oppenheimer take the student on a tour through the planning of their oral-history project. Through anecdotes, constructive advice and tips, collected readings and resources, and sample planning documents, you will learn to conduct interviews for an oral-history project and to address sensitive issues that may arise during and after the interviews. You will also learn to use oral-history materials to construct a nonarchival project, and to present and evaluate your project.
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| | Ronald Bayer and Gerald Oppenheimer | | In this second of two e-seminars on their oral-history of the AIDS epidemic, Professors Bayer and Oppenheimer take the student on a tour through the execution of their own oral-history project. Through anecdotes, constructive advice and tips, collected readings and resources, and sample documents, you will become well versed in the issues that need to be addressed before beginning an oral history project, and become equipped to complete the steps needed to plan your oral-history project to the point of conducting interviews.
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| | Volker R. Berghahn | | In this e-seminar Volker R. Berghahn, Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, explores the international developments and pressures, and the decisions made by German leaders that inexorably led to the First World War. Photographs, maps, and primary documents complement Professor Berghahn's dramatic and lucid account.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, educated Americans reacted against Victorian values. In the first in a series of e-seminars, Casey Blake describes the new attitudes about the future, the separation of the sexes, masculinity, and the role of women. He concludes by reflecting on the beginnings of modernism at the end of the nineteenth century.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | By the end of the nineteenth century, science and technology were exerting a tremendous influence on life in the United States. In this second e-seminar of the series, Casey Nelson Blake explores why Darwin's ideas seemed so revolutionary and how Darwinism helped to move the United States toward a more secular and scientific modern culture.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | In this third e-seminar of the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890-1945, Casey Nelson Blake explores the philosophy of pragmatism, details the lives and contributions of James and Dewey, and describes the critiques of pragmatist thought.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | In this fourth e-seminar of the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890-1945, Casey Nelson Blake presents the range of early-twentieth-century responses to immigration, including arguments for diversity and the contribution of W.E.B. Du Bois.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | In this fifth seminar in the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890–1945, Casey Blake explores the prewar intellectual scene and the repercussions of President Wilson's decision to join the conflict in Europe.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | In this seminar, the sixth of the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890–1945, Professor Casey Nelson Blake describes the consumer culture of the 1920s and Middle America's ambivalent embrace of it.
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| | Casey Nelson Blake | | In this seminar, the seventh of the series Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States, 1890–1945, Professor Casey Nelson Blake elucidates the impact of the Great Depression, the radical critiques that arose in response, and the legacy of a new form of culture celebrating "the people."
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In a series of ten e-seminars, America Since 1945, Alan Brinkley, Alan Nevins Professor of History, discusses the political, cultural, and social developments that occurred from the earliest years of the postwar era through the 1980s—a period in which the United States changed more rapidly and profoundly than at any other time in its history.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | What was once routinely known as "the postwar era" is now a period of more than half a century, during which the United States has probably changed more rapidly and profoundly than during any other period of its history. Historian Alan Brinkley offers an introduction to and a framework for understanding the United States since 1945.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In this e-seminar, the second in a series of ten, Professor Brinkley examines the Cold War, a key event during the "the postwar era," a period of more than half a century, during which the United States has probably changed more rapidly and profoundly than during any other period of its history. He analyzes the Cold War as a force in American domestic life, one that had an important impact on the relationships among and the distribution of power within many of the central institutions of American life.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Stable Fifties, the third e-seminar in the series America Since 1945, Professor Alan Brinkley examines the shift in American economics and culture that occurred after World War II. While many other combatant countries faced a slow rebuilding period after the war's end, the United States celebrated a vast and steady economic boom that began during the war and continued for the next twenty years. Professor Brinkley examines aspects of American middle-class culture during the Eisenhower years, including the rise of television and the expansion of the suburbs. He also offers a perspective on the Eisenhower presidency.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Subversive Fifties, the fourth e-seminar in the series America Since 1945, the eminent historian Alan Brinkley discusses a variety of early counterculture movements—literary, social, and environmental—whose origins date back to the 1950s and early 1960s. He also covers the roots of the civil-rights movement, discussing the Montgomery bus boycott, in which Martin Luther King Jr. first gained national attention.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In Kennedy, Johnson, and the Great Society, the fifth e-seminar in the series America Since 1945, the eminent historian Alan Brinkley focuses on the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Professor Brinkley compares and contrasts these two great figures of the 1960s and analyzes the social programs, such as the Great Society and the war on poverty, that became landmarks of the period.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Civil-Rights Movement, the sixth of ten e-seminars in the series America Since 1945, historian Alan Brinkley discusses one of the most important social movements in twentieth-century American history. He analyzes the events that propelled and shaped the civil-rights movement, the growing national awareness of racial inequalities in America, and the social policies that were created in response to those inequalities.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Vietnam War, the seventh of ten e-seminars in the series America Since 1945, historian Alan Brinkley discusses the policies and decisions that led to the expansion of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In Cultural Revolutions, the eighth of ten e-seminars in the series America Since 1945, historian Alan Brinkley discusses the turbulent years of the 1960s and the broad social changes that altered cultural and individual expression in American society.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Age of Limits, the penultimate e-seminar in the series America Since 1945, Professor Alan Brinkley examines the shift in the prevailing outlook and worldview of Americans during the 1970s, as assumptions about economic abundance and American power gave way to a new awareness of scarcity and constraints.
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| | Alan Brinkley | | In The Rise of the Right, the final e-seminar in the ten-part series America Since 1945, historian Alan Brinkley discusses the emergence of conservatism as a powerful political and cultural force in the United States during the past quarter-century.
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| | Richard W. Bulliet | | This e-seminar examines the history of America and its relation to the Muslim world. The series will analyze, from an American perspective, the legacy of misunderstanding between the two cultures; the forgotten wars, now over a century ago, between America and parts of the Islamic world; and the emergence of a significant Muslim population in the United States through immigration and conversion.
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| | Richard W. Bulliet | | In the second installment of this five-part series, Professor Richard W. Bulliet, a leading scholar of modern Islam, contrasts the period after World War I with the period immediately following World War II, in terms of real and imagined American engagement in the Muslim world. Although a major American role as protector of Kurds, Armenians, and Syrians was proposed after World War I, it never came to pass. Britain and France instead became the mandatory powers in the region.
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| | Richard W. Bulliet | | In the third e-seminar in this five-part series, Professor Bulliet analyzes the period when Americans began to pay attention to Islam. While American awareness of the Muslim world increased, crucial misperceptions about Islam persisted into the 1970s among American tourists, government officials, and scholars, so that all were caught off guard by the Iranian revolution in 1979.
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| | Richard W. Bulliet | | In the fourth e-seminar in this five-part series, Professor Richard W. Bulliet analyzes the period between the Iranian revolution and the Persian Gulf War. During those tumultuous 12 years, wars and political events in the Muslim world repeatedly appeared on the front pages of American newspapers, and the Black Muslim movement took root in the United States, leading to an increased awareness of Islam.
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| | Richard W. Bulliet | | In this fifth and final e-seminar in the series America and the Muslim World, Professor Bulliet examines the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. He considers how they have affected the large Muslim population in the United States and argues that Americans now have an opportunity to learn more about Islam and make their society more inclusive of Muslims.
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| | Mary Marshall Clark | | In this online seminar, Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Columbia University Oral History Office, the world's first official oral-history archive, offers detailed instruction on how to perform an oral-history interview and how to organize and operate a community oral-history project. The seminar includes audio and text examples from the rich archives of Columbia's Oral History Office.
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| | Dennis Dalton | | This series of three e-seminars is based on Dennis Dalton's enormously popular course, which he has taught since the late 1960s, on the nature and power of the Gandhian political philosophy and practice of nonviolence.
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| | Dennis Dalton | | Gandhi: Discovering the Power of Nonviolence is the opening e-seminar in a series of classes based on Dennis Dalton's extremely popular and chronically oversubscribed course on the nature and power of the Gandhian political philosophy and practice of nonviolence, which Dalton has taught since the late 1960s.
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| | Dennis Dalton | | In his second e-seminar, Professor Dalton examines the practice and theory of the man who has been called "an American Gandhi," Martin Luther King Jr. In this e-seminar, Professor Dalton grounds Martin Luther King Jr. in the historical backdrop of Montgomery, and discusses King's very explicit principles and tactics of nonviolence.
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| | Dennis Dalton | | Gandhi's Disciples is the third e-seminar in a series based on Dennis Dalton's extremely popular and chronically oversubscribed course on the nature and power of the Gandhian political philosophy and practice of nonviolence, which Dalton has taught since the late 1960s.
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| | Eric Foner | | In his eight-part series Slavery and Emancipation, Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, explores a subject that is essential to understanding the history of the United States and the evolution of our concept of freedom.
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| | Eric Foner | | Nearly 150 years after its abolition, slavery remains one of the central institutions defining American history and nationality. This e-seminar examines the origins and development of the transatlantic slave trade and the impact of slavery on colonial America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. New World slavery became more oppressive than previous forms, and the underpinnings of the institutionalization of slavery in America included new racist attitudes.
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| | Eric Foner | | In this second e-seminar of his Slavery and Emancipation series, Professor Eric Foner examines slavery and the American Revolution. He examines the dramatic struggle for freedom waged concurrently by American colonists against the British Empire and by blacks against the institution of slavery. While blacks seized the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality to justify their natural right to freedom, the U.S. Constitution protected the institution of slavery.
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| | Eric Foner | | In the third e-seminar in the series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner discusses the expansion of slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century, when it became the most powerful economic institution in the United States. He describes the arguments that proslavery Southerners used to defend their "peculiar institution" and details the system of subordination they created whereby slaves had virtually no legal rights.
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| | Eric Foner | | In Abolitionism and Antislavery, the fourth e-seminar of the series Slavery and Emancipation, Eric Foner describes how in the nineteenth century the issue of slavery came to occupy a central place in American political life and a central role in the disruption of the Union. He describes the development of a militant abolitionist movement, the expansion of slavery, secession, and other events that led inexorably to the Civil War.
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| | Eric Foner | | In The Civil War, the fifth in the series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner explores the combination of factors that propelled the Lincoln administration down the road to emancipation. Foner also describes how the service of black men in the Union forces contributed to the war's outcome and raised the question of black citizenship.
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| | Eric Foner | | In The Meaning of Freedom, the sixth e-seminar in the series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner explores the expectations and aspirations of freed blacks, the views of white Southerners, and the hopes of many Northerners in the years after the Civil War.
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| | Eric Foner | | In this e-seminar, Professor Eric Foner argues against the depiction of Reconstruction as the low point of American democracy by examining the successes and failures of the Republican coalition that briefly governed the South.
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| | Eric Foner | | In this eighth and final e-seminar of the series Slavery and Emancipation, Professor Eric Foner traces the developments that brought Reconstruction to an end and discusses what that ending meant for Southern blacks and for the nation.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In The History of the City of New York, a series of eight e-seminars, Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia, has adapted his legendary semester-length course for the Internet.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | New-York Historical Society President and eminent Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson has been teaching a course on the history of New York City for over thirty years. Through this series of online lectures, Jackson recreates the experience of his legendary Columbia University class with the complement of a wealth of documentary photographs, maps, and other illustrative material.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In his second e-seminar, Kenneth T. Jackson traces New York City's commercial character back to the days of Dutch New Amsterdam. He then examines New York's role in the Revolutionary War and the remarkable growth it experienced largely as a result of the Erie Canal.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | Urban Crisis: Fire and Water is the third e-seminar in The History of the City of New York, a series based on Kenneth T. Jackson's legendary course, which he has taught for over three decades, on the history of New York City. In this e-seminar, Professor Jackson examines the various ways that over the years New York City has responded to fires and water supply problems, two of the serious challenges faced by urban populations.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In this fourth in a series of eight e-seminars, Professor Kenneth T. Jackson, examines public space in New York and focuses on the creation of Central Park. He also discusses the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Health, the implementation of health and sanitary regulations as a response to outbreaks of cholera, and the founding of the New York City Police Department.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In City People, the fifth e-seminar in a series on the history of New York City, Professor Kenneth T. Jackson looks at New York City in the nineteenth century, focusing on developments and innovations in the city's social life and infrastructure and discussing how they changed the everyday life of New Yorkers.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In Ethnic New York, the sixth e-seminar in an eight-part series, Kenneth T. Jackson traces the development of New York City's ethnic neighborhoods, particularly two of the most famous: Harlem and the Lower East Side.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In Bosses of all Kinds, the seventh e-seminar in a series on the history of New York City, Professor Kenneth T. Jackson looks at Tammany Hall bosses, Robert Moses, and other political figures in the history of New York who, though unelected, have wielded extraordinary power.
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| | Kenneth T. Jackson | | In The Reinvention of New York, the eighth and final e-seminar in his series on the history of New York City, Professor Kenneth T. Jackson discusses New York in light of its ability to adapt to rapidly changing social, political, and economic conditions.
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| | Paul Johnson | | In his two-part e-seminar series, Poverty, Wealth, and History in the East End of London, Professor Paul Johnson explores the rich and dramatic history of the East End of London. Learn about the great surges of immigration, about the creation, destruction and re-creation of communities, about labor and toil, and consequently about the religious, political and social fault lines that have divided and defined British society in the East End community of Spitalfields.
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| | Paul Johnson | | Using Spitalfields, a historic corner of the East End, as a window onto the history of social and economic change, historian Paul Johnson explores the rich and dramatic history of the East End of London and uncovers the larger religious, political and social fault lines that have divided and defined British society.
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| | Paul Johnson | | Historian Paul Johnson examines how East Enders reacted to their poor living and working conditions, most famously in the Dock Strike of 1889, and how middle class reformers attempted to help them.
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