  These lectures are designed to introduce the methods and results of large N_c
QCD in a presentation intended for nuclear and particle physicists alike.
Beginning with definitions and motivations of the approach, we demonstrate that
all quark and gluon Feynman diagrams are organized into classes based on powers
of 1/N_c. We then show that this result can be translated into definite
statements about mesons and baryons containing arbitrary numbers of
constituents. In the mesons, numerous well-known phenomenological properties
follow as immediate consequences of simply counting powers of N_c, while for
the baryons, quantitative large N_c analyses of masses and other properties are
seen to agree with experiment, even when ``large'' N_c is set equal to its
observed value of 3. Large N_c reasoning is also used to explain some simple
features of nuclear interactions.
