The Bible is renowned as a rich source of myth and parable, prose and poetry. Indeed, much of Western Literature owes an enormous debt to the unique and widely varied writings in this important religious text.

Explore the glory that was Ancient Rome with Carnegie Teacher of the Year Frances Titchener.

The world will never see another peace conference like the one that took place in Paris in 1919. For six months, the world's major leaders - including Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, David Lloyd George, prime minister of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France - met to discuss the peace settlements to end World War I. They faced huge issues and, as the weeks went by, their agenda grew.

In this course, readers are provided an in-depth look at the single most consequential event of American history: the American Revolution. Distinguished historian Edmund Morgan wrote that no one has ever quite understood the Revolution and that no one ever will. This course is an attempt, at least on some level, to prove him wrong. While the American Revolution now appears to have been inevitable, it was, in fact, highly improbable. An early conversation...

While most courses focus on the entire sweep of the conflict, this course presents an in-depth examination of the waning days of the great struggle. We'll examine the dramatic events leading up to April 1865 and ponder some of the unthinkable alternatives that, had they materialized, would have surely prevented the formation of the country we know today.

One of the most dramatic periods in world history is the age of Europe's discovery of the world from Columbus and da Gama in the late fifteenth century to the voyages of James Cook in the eighteenth century. The extent of the changes can be seen by comparing the pre-Columbian maps, which showed no knowledge of either the Americas or the Pacific, with those of 1800, which in terms of projection, scale, and content approximate today's maps. In this...

In this course, Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry, we'll explore how Walt Whitman broke with the tyranny of European literary forms to establish a broad, new voice for American poetry. By throwing aside the stolid conventions and clichEd meters of old Europe, Walt Whitman produced a vital, compelling form of verse, one expressive of the nature of his new world and its undiscovered countries, both physical and spiritual, intimate...

Rome grew from a tiny community of small hill villages near the River Tiber in central Italy to one of the most powerful empires the world has seen. The Romans themselves believed that their great city was founded in the middle of the eighth century BCE. By the middle of the second century CE, Rome had a population of 1.5 million; Alexandria, in Egypt, 500,000; and Londinium, in Briton, 30,000. Not counting locally recruited forces, this vast empire...

Dante's Divine Comedy stands very high among the greatest literary works ever written. The Commedia is about the afterlife, not just Hell, but Purgatory and Heaven, too. Dante's genius is the genius of the allegorical method. The Commedia is, in the first instance, an account of Dante's own salvation. In chronicling his own recovery, indeed his salvation, Dante not only provides us with an autobiography, he also suggests that not only the problems...

The four main themes of this course are answers to the question, "What makes Europe distinctive compared with other parts of the world?" 1. The Nation State. The idea of the State or sovereign authority takes on a new significance when it is attached to a nation or a people who have an idea of a common origin and identity. This idea was developed first and most powerfully in Europe. 2. Citizenship. When a nation is made up of citizens, they feel a...