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Acquisition by the student of the necessary instruments to know, understand and critically appraise the processes of change and continuity in society and contemporary politics. Knowledge of the methodology and sources in the study of Contemporary History (20th century).

This course study the evolution of the world during the last century, from the general processes of the nineteenth century. It will expose the central problems of the contemporary world, alluding to events, and describing the general processes. The course starts from a perspective in which the Western world, in the keys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a center of history, incorporating in a diachronic way new looks and approaches that are fruit of the adequacy of historical discourses. The course is composed of a succession of great questions or contemporary historical problems that cross transversally the contemporaneity, and that the student have to understand from historical examples. TOPIC 1. COMPOSING THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD 1.1. The material conditions: growth and capitalism. 1.2. Political and social actions: reformism and revolution. 1.3. The national challenges: justice, civil rights and welfare. TOPIC 2. CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CULTURE. 2.1. From individual to group. Creative and critical currents. 2.2. Documenting the times of change: traditional sources and technological innovations. 2.3. Europe versus America and vice versa: times, ideas and trends between the two continents. TOPIC 3. THE TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN THE CENTURIES 3.1. Identification of historical change: the renewal of historical subjects. 3.2. Comparative history of past and present contemporaneity. 3.2. Readings around the notion of crisis, from the XIX to the XX and the XX to the XXI.

Theoretical and practical classes. The classes are master and practical sessions. The practical classes are based on audio-visual documents and reading on significant texts for the period of time and the circumstances under study. Students must question about problems given in documents and sources; so that they have to practice the competences that are intended to be developed: capacity for synthesis, critical analysis, understanding the complexity of historical phenomena. Active learning is intended. Students will receive information, but they will also research in the provided files. Theoretical classes organize the materials to adapt them to the students learning, and provide the students the knowledge that they could not obtein by their own.