EverScholar programs are more than classroom sessions, but the classes are certainly at their heart. Read about our recent and upcoming courses, with top faculty, intriguing topics, innovative approaches, supremely curated reading, and more, below. Click through the short descriptions to see the full course pages. Then, from our menus above, learn more about our faculty – lead and guest professors; see some of the readings they have selected, and then visit “Beyond the Classroom” to learn about the special events. See “Community” to see how the courses continue past their week’s end.
Limited Spots have opened in the March 21-24 “Reverberations II” Course!
Reverberations of the Revolution II
Professors: Akhil Reed Amar, Gordon Wood, and Paul Grimstad
March 21-24, 2024
Yale Law School, New Haven, CT
Registration is open for limited remaining spots!
The course will examine greatest event in American History – the American Revolution – and assess its revolutionary nature, its radicalism its transformative character, its aftermath and echoes through the early 19th Century.
By 1776 Americans knew they were launching a grand experiment in republican government. They were confident they could by their own efforts remake their culture, create anew what they thought and believed. Their Declaration of Independence told them that their equal status at birth did not determine what they might become. Suddenly, everything seemed possible. The revolutionary leaders were faced with the awesome task of creating out of their British heritage their own separate national identity. Americans now had the opportunity to realize an ideal republican world, to put the Enlightenment into practice, to create an ordered virtuous society and an illustrious classical culture that men since the Greeks had yearned for.
Little worked out in the way the Revolutionary leaders expected. By the third decade of the nineteenth century it seemed to many that American society was coming apart. So – what are we to make of the Revolution, all in all? Beyond the Revolution’s own ideas and ideals, we will also look at those ensuing decades, and see how all these things shaped the new republic; whether and which ideals were enduring and remained influential; whether they were hollowed out or even abandoned; and what all this means for the so-called “idea of America.”
But America was not “just” an idea – it was a new legal, juridical system. But what kind of system? In 1776, was America one nation or thirteen? What about in 1789? In what ways were the so-called “United States of America” united? Why did this matter? How does this set of questions connect to American ideals, both at its founding, and going forward?
We are uniquely privileged to undertake this journey with the most extraordinary leaders imaginable. Two peerless historians – Professors Gordon Wood, the greatest living historian of the Founding, and Professor Akhil Reed Amar, the greatest scholar, theorist, and historian of the American Constitution – will be joined by Professor Paul Grimstad, a prominent expert on the expression of these ideas and ideals as they were written by the Americans and their observers themselves – by Emerson, by Tocqueville, by Jefferson. The history of ideas is best studied by including the best expounders and chroniclers of those ideas, and therefore Professor Grimstad will bring those thinkers and writers to our door.
Join us as we feast on the richest material with the finest faculty, with the greatest experts on beautiful ideas expressed in the most magnificent words, for three days of exuberant immersion together.
China Encounters the World
Professors: Peter Perdue, Sulmaan Khan, Arne Westad, Rana Mitter, and Zaib Aziz
November 2-5, 2023
Boston/Cambridge, MA
Course has competed.
In this course, we will discuss intensively cultural and political interactions beween China and the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. According to a recent estimate, only 350 Americans are now actively studying in China, compared to 15,000 a decade ago. The personal relations of Americans and Chinese have declined to unprecedented lows. In the first half of the twentieth century, by contrast, China and the West engaged in widespread cultural contact. In this seminar, we will examine some of the important characters and events that affected Sino-Western relations, by looking at the writings of some of the most colorful personages of the period.
The course will connect current concerns about Chinese foreign relations with the most important underlying themes of modern China: empire, culture, nationalism and geopolitics. By exploring decisions of elites alongside popular conceptions of the identity of the Chinese nation, we expose longer trends that persist beneath day-to-day crises. Every session will use primary historical sources to address our understanding of current events. Our faculty include specialists on the Qing dynasty, Chinese nationalism, global history, cold war history, and Chinese foreign policy in the Maoist and post-Maoist era. We promise to challenge your understanding of how modern China works. Please join us for this exciting intellectual adventure!