HIST 224 - Pirates and Hackers

(3 units) CO10, CO11

This course explores the social, economic, and geopolitical causes and effects of piracy throughout history, focusing on maritime pirates and smugglers as well as hackers and intellectual property.

Grading Basis: Graded
Units of Lecture: 3
Offered: Every Spring

Student Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
1. describe the role of socio-economic factors in the rise and fall of piracy, including, but not limited to, the following: poverty, naval impressment, economic and social dislocation, religious persecution, state instability and world systems theory, ethnicity and nationalism, slavery, and refugee societies.
2. articulate ways in which piratical societies from the ancient world to the present (naval piracy to modern hacker culture) both challenge and reinforce traditional cultural norms, including but not limited to, sexuality and gender roles, democracy and autocracy, issues of authority, violence and civil society, and social justice.
3. describe the perceptions, viewpoints, or life experiences of people in at least 1 society or culture outside of the United States, including the Caribbean, the Barbary States, the Ottoman Empire, China and Southeast Asia, Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle East.
4. identify, analyze, and interpret connections between localized events and their global contexts, particularly the rise and fall of piracy (both maritime and intellectual) and its connection to globalization, transnational corporations, and international trade.
5. analyze multiple connections between geographically and/or temporally distant places and periods: Ancient World, Early Modern Mediterranean, Early Modern Caribbean and West Africa, Late Modern East Africa, Late Modern Southeast and East Asia, and present-day intellectual piracy.
6. demonstrate how local and global contexts of ideas or events result in nuanced or conflicting understandings of contemporary and/or historical ideas, events, or experiences.

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