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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Why do Walmart's current advertising campaigns idealize the stay-at-home mom? Conversely, why does Congress require that mothers on welfare be sent out to work? This course will introduce students to a broad view of American social history that foregrounds the gendered aspects of work and asks students to examine the meaning of work in American history from the colonial period to the 21st century. This broad historical perspective is especially crucial to the examination of the construction of current beliefs about work in the United States since changing gender ideologies dictated the work experiences of large race- and class-defined segments of the population. On one level, this approach allows for the recovery of women and girls' contributions to the formal and informal economies, including their work activities within the household. Male work practices will be similarly illuminated through a gender studies approach. Hence, an overarching purpose of the course will be to explore the fluidity and instability of those conceptions of work that were applied alternately to masculine as opposed to feminine occupations, just as they were alternately applied to white versus non-white, free versus enslaved, and public versus domestic activities.
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3.00 Credits
Through a close examination of 12 historical events, we will study African-American resistance in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th century. We will employ a case-study method and seek to categorize and characterize the wide variety of African-American resistance. Our study will include the politics of confrontation and civil disobedience, polarization of arts, transformation of race relations, the tragedies and triumphs of Reconstruction, interracial violence, black political and institutional responses to racism and violence, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, and the civil rights and black power movements. Students will be confronted with conflicting bodies of evidence and challenged to analyze these issues and arrive at conclusions. Music and film will supplement classroom discussions.
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3.00 Credits
What is the meaning of identity in a transnational space straddling the United States and the Caribbean? Migration, settlement and return are central to the historical experiences and the literary and aesthetic expressions of Caribbean societies. This course combines literary and anthropological perspectives to the study of novels and historical and anthropological texts in which themes of migration, immigration and transnationalism play central roles.
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3.00 Credits
This course will deal with a variety of social issues as they are perceived, conceptualized, represented, and understood by the movies. The focus of this course will not be on the cinema history, cinema structure, or movie-making processes, but on how important human problems such as cultural diversity, race relations, the crafting of national identity and national heroes, urban life, class conflict, family structure, war, and some ideological values such as success, love happiness, fairness, misfortune, destiny, honesty, faith, and the like are depicted and treated by the movies.
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3.00 Credits
The idea of globalization as a recent phenomenon is firmly grounded in the popular conscious. In the minds of most people, globalization and the accompanying processes of global commerce and trade are seen either as the solutions to the world's problems or the causes thereof. In this course, we will address the problems with these ideas as we explore the history of long-distance human interactions going back into the early history of Homo sapiens from the emergence from Africa ca. 100,000 BC to the present. Topics covered will include human migrations, trade, exchange, and other interactions from our Paleolithic ancestors to the rise of settled cultures and complex societies in both the Old and New Worlds. Particular focus will be placed on the role of long-distance exchange, trade, and commerce on human activities as ideas, goods, and peoples moved across deserts, mountains, and oceans. In-class discussions will be based on readings from anthropology, archaeology, history, economics, business studies, and political science, as well as documentaries and film to address issues of similarity and difference between past and contemporary globalization processes. The objective of the course is to understand globalization and trade as universal yet varying forces in human social and cultural evolution.
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3.00 Credits
For many Americans, the history of slavery is synonymous with plantations in the Atlantic world. This course seeks to expand our view of Atlantic slavery by looking to the Ancient World, Africa, Asia and Europe in historic and contemporary contexts. This course examines slavery as a labor system and a social form intimately connected with the political economies and cultural groups within which it arose. It will also examine debates about contemporary forms of bonded labor and slavery emerging from global encounters today. By examining different types of bonded and unfree labor, such as chattel, domestic, and wage slavery, we will form an inquiry about slavery's relationship to the following: person-hood and social death; the emergence of market economies; systems of differentiation used to maintain the social condition of the enslaved; and power and violence. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach relying on archaeology, anthropology and history for our case studies in understanding this particular social form.
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0.00 Credits
During the lab times, certain films will be viewed for further discussion in class.
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3.00 Credits
Images of terrible, horrifying mothers have long abounded in literature and have dominated media portrayals of motherhood for decades. Consider the mothers in Matilda or Coraline, or real-life examples like Nadya Suleman (the infamous Octomom) or Michelle Duggar: not only do a multitude of examples of "bad" mothering exist, but women's attempts to mother are also scrutinized in excruciating detail. In this course, we will read a selection of texts (novels, plays, poems), ranging from Greek tragedies and Beowulf to 20th-century poetry and novels to interrogate the literary use of maternal motifs. What purpose is served by making a fictional mother monstrous? What literary effect is created? We will examine contemporary American culture (magazines, blogs, movies) to theorize possible impacts on the role of the modern mother, as well as the implications for American masculinity. What does it say about society that these images are so popular? And what is the connection between a woman's reproductive power and the urge to label her "monstrous?"
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3.00 Credits
This course focuses on the broad questions that have emerged as a part of the contemporary study of the Harlem Renaissance. How did the phenomenal array of black cultural production from literature to music emerge within this section of New York City? To what degree did the Great Migration, religion, and politics influence this creativity? And how do we understand the impact of the Renaissance on African-American culture outside of New York? Discussion begins with the many works written directly about Harlem in the 1920s as well as those materials on broader African-American life that emerged from Harlem in the 1930s and early '40s. Further, while exploring the question of black Harlem and its cultural vitality, we will also deal with the interplay of white and black American artists within the New York setting. Readings include many of the traditional writers from James Weldon Johnson to Claude McKay to Zora Neale Hurston, in addition to later writers who made Harlem their focus, such as James Baldwin. To best understand the context of these works, we will discuss histories of African Americans in Harlem and New York City, as well as theoretical work on the making of black cultural expression within urban life.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar analyzes dominant American beliefs about the significance of race and gender primarily through the focusing lens of the experiences of women of color in the US. How did intersecting ideologies of race and gender attempt to define and limit the lives of women of color as well as other Americans? How have women of color responded to and reinterpreted white American ideas about their identity to develop their own self-defenses and ideologies?
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