COURSE DESCRIPTION A nation’s development is often closely bound to the work of its scientists and inventors, and nowhere is this clearer or more significant than in British history. Beginning in the 19th century, science and engineering not only helped build and maintain Britain as a global superpower, but also shaped much of the modern world. Experimentalists and theoreticians such as Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and J.J. Thomson uncovered chemical, optical and electromagnetic processes which transformed the everyday and extend the technology on which the British empire depended. Moreover, they inspired and informed later breakthroughs in physics, such as the Special and General theories of relativity. During the same period, Charles Darwin lifted the veil on life itself, throwing into question religious and philosophical certainties and paving the way for radical reinterpretations of biology, in particular Francis Crick’s decoding of the DNA sequence in the 1950s. In the early years of the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford and others at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge demonstrated the structure of the atom, opening up the quantum world and anticipating CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In this course, we’ll delve into these revelations and breakthroughs, along with many others in medicine, cosmology, photography, television, radar, aircraft design and weaponry. We’ll explore their historical context, meeting a vast and fascinating cast of characters, from Stephen Hawking to June Lindsey, from Jocelyn Bell-Burnell to Alan Turing, and from Barnes Wallis to Arthur Eddington.
COURSE EXCURSIONS Full day: Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge Half day: The Royal Institution
Religion, Rebellion, Magic and Murder: Early Modern Controversies, 1500-1800
TUTOR Dr. Tim Barrett lectures in
political history and the history of science and has been a tutor for the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education for fifteen years. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Keele University, Staffordshire.
COURSE DESCRIPTION The Reformation and the Tudor monarchs, witch hunting, the English Civil Wars, the Regicide of 1649, the Plague and the Great Fire of London, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and slavery. All controversial events in British history. And, each of these events had a profound impact on British history, either religiously, legally, socially, politically, or a combination of all of them, and the effects can still be felt in modern Britain today. In this course, we’ll examine and discuss each topic in depth, drawing our own conclusions about these events. Do you agree with what happened? Do you disagree? Do you think there might have been an alternative? What legacy do you think these events had for Britain and the wider world?
COURSE EXCURSIONS Full day: Hampton Court Palace Half day: Hailes Abbey TUTOR Dr. Charlotte Young earned her Ph.D. in early modern history from Royal Holloway, University of London. She has previously worked as an early modern contributing editor for Northamptonshire Victoria County History, and as a postdoctoral research assistant with the Civil War Petitions project, first at the University of Leicester and then with the University of Oxford. She has taught students at universities in London and Oxford as well as California and Oregon. She’s currently writing a biography of John Bradshawe, the judge who sentenced Charles I to death in 1649.
Participants will receive a suggested reading list for this course prior to the program.
Participants will receive a suggested reading list for this course prior to the program.
Shapers of the Modern World: Two Centuries of British Science and Invention
6 ∙ MSU ALUMNI
ODYSSEY TO OXFORD ∙ 7
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