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Preference to freshmen. How structures created by nature or built by human beings keep things up and keep things in. Topics: nature's structures from microorganisms to large vertebrae; buildings from ancient dwellings to modern skyscrapers; spacecraft and airplanes; boats from ancient times to America's Cup sailboats, and how they win or break; sports equipment; and biomedical devices including bone replacements and cardiovascular stents. How composite materials are used to make a structure light and strong.

Transportation accounts for nearly one-third of American energy use and greenhouse gas emissions and three-quarters of American oil consumption. It has crucial impacts on climate change, air pollution, resource depletion, and national security. Students wishing to address these issues will need to reconsider how we move, finding sustainable transportation solutions. This course will provide an introduction to the issue, covering the past and present of transportation and its impacts; examining alternative fuel proposals; and digging deeper into the most promising option: battery electric vehicles. Energy requirements of air, ground, and maritime transportation; design of electric motors, power control systems, drive trains, and batteries; and technologies for generating renewable energy. Two fun opportunities for hands-on experiences with electric cars. Prerequisites: Introduction to calculus and Physics AP or elementary mechanics.

Theory and research on African Americans' roles in post-Civil Rights, US social movements. Topics include women¿s right, LGBT rights, environmental movement, and contemporary political conservativism.

Preference to sophomores. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president in May 1994 marked the end of an era and a way of life for S. Africa. The changes have been dramatic, yet the legacies of racism and inequality persist. Focus: overlapping and sharply contested transitions. Who advocates and opposes change? Why? What are their historical and social roots and strategies? How do people reconstruct their society? Historical and current sources, including films, novels, and the Internet.

Preference to freshmen. How literature, theater, graphic art and popular culture shape understandings of contemporary "mixed race" identity and other complex experiences of cultural hybridity. Course explores implications for racial identity, art, and politics for the new millennium.

Preference to freshmen. The tendency of critics to view the 60s through ideological lenses as either the best or worst of times has made a balanced perspective difficult to achieve. Goal is to provide a sociological explanation for the political and cultural turbulence that marked the era. The confluence of demographic, political, economic, and cultural trends that date back to at least the 30s. The ambiguous legacy of the 60s. Using the 60s to shed light on the 80s and 90s. Enrollment limited to 16.

We may "know" "who" we "are," but we are, after all, social creatures. How does our sense of self interact with those around us? How does literature provide a particular medium for not only self expression, but also for meditations on what goes into the construction of "the Self"? After all, don't we tell stories in response to the question, "who are you"? Besides a list of nouns and names and attributes, we give our lives flesh and blood in telling how we process the world. Our course focuses in particular on this question--Does this universal issue ("who am I") become skewed differently when we add a qualifier before it, like "ethnic"?

Preference to freshmen. Mark Twain has been called our Rabelais, our Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. President Franklin D.\n\nRoosevelt got the phrase New Deal from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Class discussions will focus on how Twain's work illuminates and complicates his society's responses to such issues as race, technology, heredity versus environment, religion, education, and what it means to be American.

Preference to sophomores. Introduction to the ideas, sensibility, and, to a lesser degree, the politics of the American 60s. Topics: the early 60s vision of a beloved community; varieties of racial, generational, and feminist dissent; the meaning of the counterculture; and current interpretive perspectives on the 60s. Film, music, and articles and books.