From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

Professor Snowden describes the final exam, and takes questions from students.

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

In the eighteenth century, smallpox succeeded plague as the most feared disease. The two maladies, however, are very different. While plague is a bacterial disease, smallpox is viral. Plague is spread by rats and fleas, smallpox is transmitted by contact and airborne inhalation. Unlike plague, s...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

The next and final Enlightenment tradition to be examined in the class is that of John Rawls, who, according to Professor Shapiro, was a hugely important figure not only in contemporary political philosophy, but also in the field of philosophy as a whole. The class is introduced to some of the p...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

In this lecture, Professor Freeman discusses the Declaration of Independence and sets the document in its historical context. The Declaration was not the main focus of the Second Continental Congress, which was largely concerned with organizing the defensive war effort. The Congress had sent Kin...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

SARS, avian influenza and swine flu are the first new diseases of the twenty-first century. They are all diseases of globalization, or diseases of modernity, and while relatively limited in their impact, they have offered dress-rehearsals for future epidemics. As information about SARS spread in...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

One of the major cultural consequences of the second plague pandemic was its effect on attitudes towards death and the "art of dying." As a result both of its extreme virulence and the strictness of the measures imposed to combat it, plague significantly disrupted traditional customs of dealing ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

This lecture focuses on the best-selling pamphlet of the American Revolution: Thomas Paine’s

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

The class’s examination of Nozick's minimal state has raised a number of important questions, most of which are rooted in his troublesome model of compensation. Nozick would respond with his threefold account of justice: (1) justice in acquisition, (2) justice in transfer, and (3) rectifica...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, the largest public health campaign ever launched, began in 1988 with the ambition of achieving its goal by the year 2000. In the decade since this deadline was missed, the initiative has suffered a number of setbacks, notably in the tropical world. Four m...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

Community responses to the bubonic plague ranged from the flight of a privileged few to widespread panic and the persecution of foreigners and other stigmatized social groups. The suspicion of willful human agency in spreading the disease, identified with the work of poisoners, was a major sourc...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

The lecture first concludes the discussion of the First Continental Congress, which met in 1774. Ultimately, although its delegates represented a range of opinions, the voices of the political radicals in the Congress were the loudest. In October 1774, the Continental Congress passed both the ra...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

Professor Shapiro dives more deeply into Robert Nozick’s theory of the minimal, or night watchman, state. This formulation is not redistributive, nor does it consider rights as goals, but rather as side-constraints on what we can do. In other words, Nozick's is a deontological, not teleolog...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

Dr. Margaret Craven discusses HIV/AIDS from the perspective of a front-line clinician. AIDS is unprecedented in both the speed with which it spread across the globe and in the mobilization of efforts to control it. It is a disease of modernity. Along with the relative ease and velocity of modern ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

The bubonic plague is the measure by which succeeding epidemics have long been measured. Its extreme virulence, horrible symptoms, and indiscriminate victim profile all contributed to making plague the archetypical worst-case scenario. For these same reasons, the plague is also an ideal test cas...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:47 AM

Professor Freeman lays out the logic of American resistance to British imperial policy during the 1770s. Prime Minister Lord North imposed the Intolerable Acts on Massachusetts to punish the radicals for the Boston Tea Party, and hoped that the act would divide the colonies. Instead, the colonie...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:46 AM

The final Enlightenment tradition left to be explored in this course is social contract theory, for which we must return to Locke and somehow secularize his views and reconcile them with the refutation of natural rights. Modern social contract theorists replace natural rights with Kant’s categor...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:46 AM

Professor Freeman continues her discussion of the Boston Massacre and how it represented a growing sense of alienation between the American colonists and the British authorities. The Americans and British both felt that the colonies were subordinate to Parliament in some way, but differed in the...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:46 AM

The global AIDS pandemic furnishes a case study for many of the themes addressed throughout the course. While in the developed West the disease largely afflicts concentrated high-risk groups such as intravenous drug users and the sexually promiscuous, in Southern Africa it is much more a general...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:46 AM

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, carried out in Macon, Alabama, from 1932 to 1972, is a notorious episode in the checkered history of medical experimentation. In one of the most economically disadvantaged parts of the U.S., researchers deceived a group of 399 black male syphilitics into participatin...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:46 AM

We previously established that the reality of scarcity invalidates Marx’s core idea of superabundance, and mortally wounds his theory. Certainly, his historical predictions about worker-led socialist revolutions around the world were off-mark. Today, Professor Shapiro presents more of the shortc...