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Professor Kleiner features the tumultuous year of 68-69 when Rome had four competing emperors. Vespasian emerged the victor, founded the Flavian dynasty, and was succeeded by his sons, Titus and Domitian. The Flavians were especially adept at using architecture to shape public policy. Professor Kleiner demonstrates that Vespasian linked himself with the divine Claudius by completing the Claudianum and distanced himself from Nero by razing...more
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Banks, which were first created in primitive form by goldsmiths hundreds of years ago, have evolved into central economic institutions that manage the allocation of resources, channel information about productive activities, and offer the public convenient investment vehicles. Although there are several types of banking institutions, including credit unions and Saving and Loan Associations, commercial banks are the largest and most...more
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Until now we have ignored risk aversion. The Bernoulli brothers were the first to suggest a tractable way of representing risk aversion. They pointed out that an explanation of the St. Petersburg paradox might be that people care about expected utility instead of expected income, where utility is some concave function, such as the logarithm. One of the most famous and important models in financial economics is the Capital Asset Pricing...more
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This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob...more
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In this lecture, Professor Kagan examines Pericles as a general. First, he describes Pericles' strategy of war and then he evaluates this strategy. According to Professor Kagan, Pericles' strategy was characterized by being both defensive and rational. It was defensive, because the Athenians did not engage the Spartans in a traditional hoplite battle, and it was rational, because Pericles assumed that the Spartans would cease fighting...more
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Work by Wöhler and Liebig on benzaldehyde inspired a general theory of organic chemistry focusing on so-called radicals, collections of atoms which appeared to behave as elements and persist unchanged through organic reactions. Liebig's French rival, Dumas, temporarily advocated radicals, but converted to the competing theory of types which could accommodate substitution reactions. These decades teach more about the psychology, sociology,...more
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This lecture examines Inferno IV -VII. Dante's Limbo, modeled on the classical locus amoenus, is identified as a place of repose and vulnerability. Here, in fact, among the poets of antiquity, the pilgrim falls prey to poetic hubris by joining in their ranks. The pilgrim is faced with the consequences of his poetic vocation when he descends to the circle of lust (Inferno V), where Francesca da Rimini, in her failure to distinguish romance...more
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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 the disease has long confined its outbreaks in Western Europe to the nineteenth century. Through his investigation, Snowden discovered that there...more
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Jeremy Bentham's formulation of classical utilitarianism is the first Enlightenment tradition that the course will cover in depth. In his Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham outlines the principle of utility; that is, the principle that all men are pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding. Professor Shapiro presents the case that classical utilitarianism has five characteristics: (1) it is comprehensive and deterministic, (2) it is a...more
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The debate between contagionists and anticontagionists over the transmission of infectious diseases played a major role in nineteenth-century medical discourse. On the one side were those who believed that diseases could be spread by infected material, perhaps including people and inanimate objects, and on the other those who subscribed to the more venerable miasmatic theory. Although the contagionist view would be substantially...more
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This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the...more
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While Nazi Germany's crimes were unprecedented, Adolf Hitler himself was in many respects a typical figure. An idle youth, of seemingly mediocre talents, his political career and passionate hatreds were formed by the experience of World War I. The rise of fascism in Germany, as elsewhere, must be understood in the context of a postwar climate of resentment and instability. Germany's economic crisis, in particular, led the middle classes...more
