This course will survey British history from 1848 to the present day, charting how Great Britain-the most powerful nation and empire of the nineteenth-century world-evolved into "Little England"-a small country on the margins of Europe-in little over 100 years. The first half of the course will investigate Victorian Britain and its remarkable political stability; some of the later challenges mounted to the liberal parliamentary system by workers and feminists; British industrial expansion and its profoundly transformative effects on urban life and social structure; the ideology of "Victorianism" and its implications for gender roles and family life; and finally, the expansion of the British Empire and its impact on domestic life. The second half of this course will chart Britain's troubled development in the twentieth century, from "the strange death of liberal England" before 1914, to the outbreak and trauma of World War I, the anxious interwar period punctuated by the Great Depression and Appeasement, and the experience of yet another "total war" against the Germans between 1939 and 1945. We will examine how the British struggled to invent a new post-imperial identity for themselves after 1945, when they confronted not only their nation's economic decline but decolonization, the loss of their Great Power status, an increasing dependence on the United States, and a conflicted relationship with the rest of Europe which continues to this day. The instructor will deliver several introductory lectures, but the bulk of the course will be devoted to class discussion of the readings, which, in addition to secondary sources, will include contemporary political documents, social surveys, reportage, novels and films. Format: lecture/discussion. Evaluation will be based on class participation, several short papers and a final exam. No enrollment limit. Open to all. Group B