The undergraduate seminar will investigate how architecture and related arts have been used to create national, religious and ethnic identities. After an initial discussion of Washington D.C., the seminar will focus on a series of pre-modern cities and their major monuments (e.g. Athens, Persepolis, Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople/Istanbul) to ask how architecture functions in the construction of identities and, with demographic and religious changes, how established identities may be contested. Finally, we will examine the redefinition of the historic past with the rise of the modern nations, and the commodification of history with the development of tourism.