Our phones provide connection, communication and knowledge – and have become part of our identities. No wonder privacy violations bother us so much Related: Inside the FBI's encryption battle with Apple Apple’s recent refusal to abide by a court order to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone has brought

This course is designed to acquaint students with a variety of approaches to the past used by historians writing in the twentieth century. The books we read have all made significant contributions to their respective sub-fields and have been selected to give as wide a coverage in both field and methodology as possible in one semester's worth of reading. We examine how historians conceive of their object of study, how they use primary sources as a basis for their accounts, how they structure the narrative and analytic discussion of their topic, and what are the advantages and drawbacks of their various approaches.

Economists through history have explored economic and environmental interactions, physical limits to growth, what constitutes the good life, and how economic justice can be assured. Yet economists continue to use measures and models that simplify these issues and promote bad outcomes. Ecological economics responds to this tension between the desire for simplicity and the multiple perspectives needed to understand complexity in order to move toward sustainable, fulfilling, just economies.

This course explores the history of information and associated technologies, uncovering why we think of ours as "the information age." We will select moments in the evolution of production, recording, and storage from the earliest writing systems to the world of Short Message Service (SMS) and blogs. In every instance, we'll be concerned with both what and when and how and why, and we will keep returning to the question of technological determinism: how do technological developments affect society and vice versa?