The School of Human Inquiry · philosophy, history & belief
Modern History
Revolutions, industry, and total war — the crowded two centuries that built the present.
America, France, and Haiti — the declarations that redefined who counts, and the wars they cost.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — Ideas That Traveled
Enlightenment arguments · Pamphlets and coffeehouses · Rights, declared
Unit II — Three Revolutions
American independence · France, from Bastille to Terror · Haiti frees itself
Unit III — Aftershocks
Napoleon's empire · The Congress of Vienna · 1848: the springtime that failed
How industry remade society in three generations — and who paid for the remaking.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — The Take-Off
Why Britain first · Coal, cotton, and steam · The factory and the clock
Unit II — The New Society
Cities grow faster than sewers · Class and the labor question · Women and children in the mills
Unit III — Responses
Reform acts and unions · Socialism's varieties · World's fairs and the gospel of progress
Unit IV — Industry Goes Global
Railways and telegraphs · Empire as market and mine · The Great Divergence debate
Thirty-one years of catastrophe, told plainly and without flinching.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — The Great War
July 1914: how it happened · Trenches and total war · Home fronts · The peace that failed
Unit II — Between the Wars
Weimar and the Depression · Fascism's rise · Stalin's revolution from above · Appeasement
Unit III — The Second World War
Blitzkrieg to Barbarossa · The Pacific war · The Holocaust · The bomb and the end
Unit IV — Reckonings
Nuremberg and Tokyo · Displaced persons · Memory and memorials
Four decades of armed rivalry that never quite became a war, and shaped everything anyway.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — The Freeze
Yalta to the Iron Curtain · Containment · The Berlin blockade and airlift
Unit II — Flashpoints
Korea · The Cuban missile crisis · Vietnam · Proxy wars in Africa and Latin America
Unit III — Life Under Rivalry
The arms race and the space race · Dissidents and détente · The non-aligned world
Unit IV — The Thaw
Gorbachev's gamble · 1989 across Eastern Europe · The Soviet end, and what the Cold War left behind
How the empires ended — independence movements from Delhi to Accra, and what came after the flags.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Empire at Noon
The colonial world in 1919 · Wilson's moment, missed · Interwar nationalisms
Unit II — Independence Won
India and partition · Ghana and the African wave · Algeria's hard war · Indonesia and Vietnam
Unit III — After the Flag
Nation-building and its costs · The Non-Aligned Movement · Legacies in language and borders