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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Beginning with the psychological, cultural, and environmental changes brought by the Atomic Bomb, this seminar traces Americans' growing environmental awareness and concern with corporate power. We will look at classics like Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as well as films, poetry, popular texts, and histories complicating traditional notions of the origins and conduct of the contemporary environmental movement. Students will have the opportunity to explore an aspect of environmentalism or the environment in depth through a semester writing project.
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1.00 Credits
How can scholars better use the ordinary things people surround themselves with to interpret past lives and events? Through selected readings and an archaeological case study, we will identify "best practices" for integrating artifacts and collectibles with documentary research in narrating and exhibiting the past. We will identify ideological and political uses of historical material culture and develop critical methods for analyzing historic materials, not as monuments to the past, but as legible research materials for scholarly work. Our case study focuses on one of Rhode Island's earliest plantations. The course will include a site visit and work in the archaeology lab, supported by critical readings in material culture theories and methods.
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1.00 Credits
Sexual practices are a mirror to American society in past and present. Sex is not a mere biological reality or a natural force but instead is as much a social and cultural construct. Acts of sex are etched into the structure of states, economies, and families, embedded in systems of inequality based on race, class, gender, and nation. Economic, social, and political processes shape how we make sense of sex, and meanings of sex shift across time and space. The one central question is: how have the meanings of sexuality, standards of sexual regulation and sexual politics varied over time with changing circumstances? Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
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1.00 Credits
This seminar examines the ways in which the histories of Asian and Latino immigration parallel and intersect each other throughout US history. Capitalist development and labor migrations; wars and refugees; immigration policies and changing racial formations will be among the topics we explore.
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1.00 Credits
Focusing on the beginning, middle, and especially concluding decades of the 20th century, this course examines the ways in which both expert and popular discourse in the US have conflated male adolescence with social pathology and have constructed an image of the teenage boy as both symptomatic of and responsible for the nation's ills. Particular attention will be paid to issues of gender, race, and class. Primary source readings and original research will be emphasized.
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1.00 Credits
This class will examine the role clothes have played in constructing notions of masculinity and manhood from the mid-19th century to the present. We will take seriously the oft-heard comment, "the clothes make the man," by studying the sartorial circumstances around the formation of men's fashion. These circumstances include class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and generation. Our study will be episodic and privilege New York and Los Angeles, though other locations will be considered comparatively.
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1.00 Credits
Americans worry about the quality of their civic life and fear its decline. We examine the public sphere's popular and political dimensions as well as challenges to the boundaries of American public life. Who is a citizen and thus eligible to participate? The course pays particular attention to concerns about the impact of new media--print, broadcasting, the internet. Taught simultaneously with the same course at the University of Melbourne, Australia, students will be linked digitally for discussion and collaborative writing. Enrollment limited to 20 juniors and seniors.
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1.00 Credits
This seminar will examine historic house museums within the context of American culture from the founding of Mount Vernon in 1853 to their present decline in popularity and relevance. Utilizing sources from a variety of disciplines including literature, women's and family history, and museum and preservation theory and practice, students will re-examine the prevailing historic house museum paradigm and develop interpretation plans for house museums in the Providence area. Enrollment limited to 20. If oversubscribed, priority is given to students in the Public Humanities Programs and Department of American Civilizations. No prerequisites.
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1.00 Credits
To understand how American culture thinks about the past, we will explore a range of texts including museum exhibits, historical society collections, memorials, and civic celebrations. These sites and objects, the material culture of memory, help us understand the construction of national, community and personal identity. Students will also undertake practical projects in memorialization and commemoration, among them designing the program for a new memorial to the Rhode Island slave trade.
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1.00 Credits
This course will focus on some of the novels and stories by James that have been made more than once into films or tv shows - Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl - and study the narrative and visual choices as interpretations of James's texts. Critical readings on the art of fiction and the art of film will also be included. Enrollment limited to 20. WRIT
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