Also, I did not wish to appear partisan and encourage support of Obama’s health care policies, which I personally favor; however, there is more than one reason to attend this event. You can go to support the president. You can go because you simply want to see and hear the man once in your life. Or you can go and protest his policies. It’s up to you. If you are living on campus, RSVP and brave the crowds to go. If it’s too late to get a ticket, go check out the chaos there. I’m sure there will be interesting supporters and protestors outside too.

• Information about the event and a link to RSVP

I’m sorry I did not address this earlier. After all our missed classes due to snow, I was stubbornly resisting the inevitable.

Meanwhile, your paper is still due on Friday evening. Don’t forget about that. But you can finish it after this event, since it isn’t due until midnight.

And assume that I will make no changes to the reading schedule. Be prepared next week.

Also, students who drive to class should expect heavy traffic and a parking nightmare. It is quite possible that those of us who ride busses will encounter trouble too, so plan ahead.

(I meant to post this earlier, but I accidentally sent it to a different blog. Sorry.)

[hat tip: Mason Spirit]

If you have trouble writing good, clean prose, remember to make an appointment with the Writing Center right away. Non-native speakers should also read about the Writing Center’s improved ESL support.

This course will explore social, economic, cultural, and political developments in Germany from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Topics to consider include the dual revolutions of the nineteenth century, industrial and political, and their accompanying social and cultural effects; the creation of a German nation-state from a loose collection of independent kingdoms, principalities, and city-states; developments in war and society that led not only to the creation of a German nation-state in 1871, but also to the two World Wars that ended in Germany’s division and the Cold War; the integration of West Germany into NATO and the European Union, on the one hand, and East Germany into the Warsaw Pact and Soviet economic structures, on the other hand; and, finally, reunification of the capitalist West and communist East within the context of Western economic, political, and security frameworks. The World Wars and Holocaust pose central challenges for us as we consider the shifting nature of Germany as both an idea and a state over the past two centuries; however, we will consider other lines of development in modern German history as well.