From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

This lecture focuses on George Washington and the combined qualities that made him a key figure in Revolutionary America, arguing that the most crucial reason for his success as a national leader was that he proved repeatedly that he could be trusted with power - a vital quality in a nation fear...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

In this lecture, Professor Shapiro delves into the nuances of MacIntyre’s argument, focusing specifically on his Aristotelian account of human psychology. It has two features: (1) man's nature is inherently teleological or purposive, and (2) human behavior is fundamentally other-directed, i...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

Asiatic cholera was the most dreaded disease of the nineteenth century. While its demographic impact could not compare to that of the bubonic plague, it nonetheless held a tremendous purchase on the European social imagination. One reason for the intense fear provoked by the disease was its symp...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

Professor Shapiro explains the format and structure of the class during this opening session. He reviews the syllabus, and asks the central question of the course: What makes a government legitimate? He briefly explains the five ways to answer this question that he will focus on throughout the s...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

The sanitary movement was an approach to public health first developed in England in the 1830s and '40s. With increasing industrialization and urbanization, the removal of filth from towns and cities became a major focus in the struggle against infectious diseases. As pioneered by Edwin Cha...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

To show how Americans experienced the war and made difficult choices, Professor Freeman offers a spur-of-the-moment lecture on New Haven during the Revolution, discussing how Yale College students and New Haven townspeople gradually became caught up in the war. Warfare finally came to New Haven ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

In addition to the traditionalist-conservative view covered last time, the other anti-Enlightenment school the course explores is contemporary communitarianism. While Burke and Devlin appealed to tradition as the basis for our values, communitarians appeal to the community-accepted values as the...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

Professor Snowden describes the historical detective work that went into the research and writing of Naples in the Time of Cholera, his study of the 1884 and 1911 epidemics of Asiatic cholera that struck Italy. The latter epidemic is of particular interest, because the official historiography of...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, Paris was at the center of a series of major developments in medical science, sometimes described as the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Although the innovations associated with the Paris School were in large part products ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

In this lecture, Professor Freeman discusses Benedict Arnold as a case study of the ways in which ideas about regionalism, social rank, and gender--and the realities of the Continental Congress and the Continental Army--played out in this period. Like many Americans during this period, Benedict ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

The mature Rawls departed quite a bit from his earlier theory of justice, choosing instead an overlapping consensus, or political, not metaphysical approach. Professor Shapiro argues that this is a significant departure from the Enlightenment tradition. In a wrap-up of the class’s examination of...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

The mature Rawls departed quite a bit from his earlier theory of justice, choosing instead an overlapping consensus, or political, not metaphysical approach. Professor Shapiro argues that this is a significant departure from the Enlightenment tradition. In a wrap-up of the class’s examination of...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

Edmund Burke was an English politician who wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France to express his disdain for the destructive havoc wrought by the French Revolution. As a traditionalist-conservative, he thinks about social change in a cautious and incremental way and characterizes the ...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

Professor Freeman concludes the discussion of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was widely circulated and read aloud throughout the colonies. Professor Freeman argues that by 1775-1776, British and American citizens were operating under different assumptions about how the conflict...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

In this lecture, Professor Freeman discusses four difficulties that the Continental Congress faced in organizing the colonial war effort: regionalism, localism, the supply shortage that the Continental Army faced in providing for its troops, and the Continental Congress’s inexperience in organiz...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

It is not known for certain when smallpox first appeared in Europe; however, the disease reached its highpoint in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it persisted as an endemic disease while periodically erupting as an epidemic. European literature testifies to the pervasiveness of sm...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Wed, May 25 2011 12:45 AM

The main focus of today’s discussion is Rawls's third and most problematic principle, the difference principle, which states that income and wealth is to be distributed "to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individual." This stems from the logic that what is good for the least ad...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Fri, Apr 29 2011 3:45 PM

Suppose you have a perfect model of contingent mortgage prepayments, like the one built in the previous lecture. You are willing to bet on your prepayment forecasts, but not on which way interest rates will move. Hedging lets you mitigate the extra risk, so that you only have to rely on being ri...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Fri, Apr 29 2011 3:45 PM

According to the rational expectations hypothesis, traders know the probabilities of future events, and value uncertain future payoffs by discounting their expected value at the riskless rate of interest. Under this hypothesis the best predictor of a firm’s valuation in the future is its stock p...

From: ACADEMIC EARTH on Fri, Apr 29 2011 3:45 PM

Professor Geanakoplos explains how, as a mathematical economist, he became interested in the practical world of mortgage securities, and how he became the Head of Fixed Income Securities at Kidder Peabody, and then one of six founding partners of Ellington Capital Management. During that time Ki...