Revolutions: The Power of An Idea

Catalog description

Course description: This humanities course will examine the concept and development of revolutions and globalization. We will focus in situations of status quo, chance of reforms and "change through revolutions", including alternatives not taken. We will have a general approach to the narratives and tools of global revolutions and human management of change, including technologies provided and environment, providing multidisciplinary methods of inquiry. We will analyse cases connected with cultural landscapes and institutions -museums, academies- from Madrid and Spain, giving the students a unique individual experience of material culture: texts, paintings, buildings, or sounds. The program will explore the so-called "Atlantic revolutions", from the 1770s to the 1820s, including those in the USA, France, Haiti, Spanish or Portuguese America, and other representations of "political modernity". Then we will study revolutions in Economy and production in the 1800s, from iron and coal to steel and petrol, Technoscience, the 1950s, Cold War, China and other Asian and African models. Last but not least, we will study cultural revolutions in the Sixties, from food to music, fashion, consumerism, politics and the last global age, including digital impacts.