| Week One |
| 1 | Introduction: Reason in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance | |
| 2 | Demography, Geography, Agriculture, Global Trade, 1600-1850 | |
| Week Two |
| 3 | Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church | |
| 4 | The Cartesian Method | |
| Week Three |
| 5 | The Trial of Charles I, King of England (1649) | |
| 6 | Louis XIV and the Court at Versailles | First paper due |
| Week Four |
| 7 | Writing Workshop | |
| Week Five |
| 8 | The Radical Enlightenment | |
| 9 | The Newtonian Moment | Rewrite of first paper due |
| Week Six |
| 10 | The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert | |
| 12 | Cosmopolitanism and the Jews in the Eighteenth Century | |
| Week Seven |
| 13 | France in the Age of Democratic Revolution | Second paper due |
| 14 | Revolution in France | |
| Week Eight |
| 15 | The Trial of Louis XVI | |
| Week Nine |
| 16 | After The King's Trial: Terror, Napoleon, Restoration | |
| 17 | Conservatism Created: A Response to Reason and Revolution | |
| Week Ten |
| 18 | Hegel: History, Reason, and the State | |
| 19 | Romanticism in Literature, Art, and Music | |
| Week Eleven |
| 20 | The Industrial Revolution and the Movement to Abolish Slavery | Third paper due |
| Week Twelve |
| 21 | A Cultural Interpretation of Industrialization | |
| 22 | Nineteenth-Century Liberalism | |
| Week Thirteen |
| 23 | Utopian Socialist Experiments | |
| 24 | The Revolutions of 1848 and The Communist Manifesto
| |
| Week Fourteen |
| 25 | Darwin and Christian Theology (or, Galileo Revisited) | |
| 26 | Conclusion | Fourth paper due |
