This course will explore the development of the United States Supreme Court's varied and occasionally contradictory decisions regarding civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. The concepts of equal protection and due process of law will guide our inquiry. The course will be both an introduction to contemporary India and an engagement with social theory. We will study concrete issues of Indian politics, economics, culture, and gender relations as we think about the forms of modernity in different parts of the world. We will critically examine the assumptions behind progressivist concepts such as modernization, economic development, and nation building.
Readings are works in the social sciences and humanities by Indian, American, and European authors.
Immediately after the Second World War, a clash of ideologies developed into a Cold War between the two victors, the United States and Soviet Russia. This course will analyze the direction of American foreign policy during an era that has been characterized as a pax americana. It will also make use of new material dealing with the Soviet approach to the postwar world by studying excerpts from recently released Soviet archives. The Cold War also traces a trajectory from American predominance to American decline, from Soviet assertion as a superpower to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War paradoxically marks the end of the superpower phenomenon.