Minicourses

Dr Phil Mundo, Professor Emeritus
Department of Political Science and International Relations, Environmental Studies and Sustainability Program, Drew U.
Tuesday afternoons, 1:30 - 3:30 pm
September 15, 22, 29; October 6 and 13

This course examines U.S. foreign policy from the founding to the present. It begins with a discussion of how practitioners and scholars have thought about U.S. foreign policy. The course then reviews the origins and history of U.S. foreign policy focusing on key events and turning points. Throughout this part of the course, we will examine competing explanations of how and why the U.S. has acted in the international system. The last part of the course considers recent U.S. foreign policy in light of this historical and thematic context.

The Making of a World Power: Spanish-American War to World War II
Dr Gary Darden, Associate Professor of History and Chair,
Dept of Social Sciences and History; Fairleigh Dickinson U.
Thursday afternoons, 1:30 - 3:30 pm
September 10, 17, 24, (skip October 1), 8 and 15

Over the course of the 19th century, the United States steadily built a continental empire from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 through the Settlement of the West in the 1890s, but the pressing debate was whether that impetus for expansion should cross the oceans of the world to match its industrial power and expressed need for global markets and raw materials. From the Spanish American War through World War I, the United States in one generation engaged in a global scope of military intervention and economic activity that faced a Nationalist blowback in the 1920s to an Isolationist resurgence in the 1930s.

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Minicourses at Madison Library is run by the Friends of the Madison Public Library, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All proceeds support the Madison Public Library.