Let’s Go to London and Paris!

Welcome to these online materials for the Jan 2013 course: The Making of the Modern Mind (IDIV 240, Manchester College). This course satisfies the 3-GC (Global Connections) requirement for the Core program.

January Session for 2013 begins on January 3 (Thursday) and ends on January 23 (Wednesday).

We will meet as a class on campus for a few days before departing from Fort Wayne on Tuesday, January 8, for London and then Paris, spending a week in each city. Travel from London to Paris will be on the high-speed Eurostar train that travels under the English Channel.

We will fly back to Chicago on Tuesday, January 22.

There will be plenty of time for sight-seeing — and our onsite activities for the class will take us into various corners of each city, as well as art galleries (such as the National Gallery and the Tate Modern in London; the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) and various museums of science and natural history. Interested students may want to take in a musical or other theatre production in London’s famous West End.

Men have always lived in ‘modern’ times but they have not always been so much impressed with the fact. Our own time, conventionally considered as beginning about 1500 A.D., is the first to coin so neat a term and apply it so consistently. Modern derives from a late Latin adverb meaning just now, and in English is found in its current sense, contrasted with ancient, as early as the sixteenth century. This awareness of a shared newness, of a way of life different from that of one’s forebears — and by 1700 awareness of a way of life felt by many to be much better that that of their forebears — this is in itself one of the clearest marks of our modern culture.

— Crane Brinton, The Shaping of Modern Thought (1950)

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

— L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

Manchester College // Registrar // MC Study Abroad // Last updated: 14 Nov 2012