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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course will focus on dress and material culture in Colonial North America. It will provide an introduction to methodology, and offer an overview of key themes in the history of dress and consumerism within the framework of gender studies. In our focus on the colonial period (especially the 18th century), we will analyze the economics of dress (the production, marketing and acquisition of cloth and clothing) and will assess the importance of fashion to commerce and politics. We will evaluate the role of dress in the construction of colonial identities, and we will examine the ways that dress operated as a visual locus for racial, class and ethnic encounters.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine various forms of magazine journalism, from the direct presentation of information to narrative journalism to the art of the first-person essay. The class, requiring students to complete a variety of written assignments while performing in a workshop setting, will emphasize those storytelling techniques essential to writing for publication.
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3.00 Credits
Non-fiction writers are "artists under oath," according to the luminous definition coined by Desmond McCarthy, British critic and essayist who was a member of the Bloomsbury group of writers and painters in the early twentieth century. The phrase is apt because it captures the dual challenge of non-fiction writing that aspires to rise above mere workaday journalism: It must be absolutely truthful and utterly fact-based, but it also should display a literary quality that puts it in the front rank of the very best imaginative works. We will be reading and analyzing books and articles that achieve this rare blend of fact and artistry, from the controversial true-crime chronicle "In Cold Blood" to a book such as "The Devil's Highway," that helps personalize the debate over immigration policy, to a book such as "Sons of Mississippi," that traces the complicated question of race as it moves through recent American history. Along with reading and discussing these works and others, we will be attempting our own non-fiction narratives, developing strategies to help turn the reporting of information into works that transcend the limits of daily journalism.
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3.00 Credits
While race is a notoriously difficult concept to define, it is undoubtedly a powerful force in American life. But how do we know what we know about race? Where do these ideas come from? How will matters of race and representation change in the era of Barack Obama? Focusing on the late nineteenth century to the present, this course explores the ways in which ideas about race are formed, negotiated, and resisted in the arena of American popular culture. From blackface minstrelsy on the vaudeville stage to contemporary comedy, television, and music, this course will ask how popular culture actively shapes - rather than merely reflects - American ideas about race and ethnicity. Rather than emphasizing on a particular racial or ethnic group, we will more broadly examine the politics and practices of representing difference in the United States. By engaging with a diverse set of theoretical, historical, and primary texts, students will learn to approach and analyze popular culture with a critical eye.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the relationship between religious belief and secular feminism in the United States. Though its primary focus is on Christianity, we will briefly consider feminism in other religious traditions. Themes include: religious movements and women's rights; women, work, and vocation; sexuality and the body; and feminist critiques of religion.
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3.00 Credits
The U.S.-Mexico border has been a hotly contested social and political space since it took its current shape in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the border remains the source of contentious debates in the United States - from proposed amnesty for undocumented workers and unprecedented activism for migrants' rights to those who argue for a 700-mile fence to physically divide the two nations - even as Latinos have become America's largest minority group. This course will unpack these varied (and often contradictory) meanings of the border, paying particular attention to the history of representations of Mexico and "Mexicanness" in the United States and their impact upon foreign policy, political organizing, and cultural relations. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and texts from history, sociology, film studies, critical race theory, cultural studies, and ethnic studies. Together we will read texts as varied as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and Steven Soderberg's Traffic.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine sports, recreation, and leisure as forms of American cultural and political expression, identity formation, and as resources for community building through the 19th and 20th centuries. This semester readings and discussion will focus on the theme of gender, but race and class will also figure prominently, as will politics, the environment, media, consumption, and spectacle.
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3.00 Credits
How is a national park different from a national wilderness area, a city park, the lakes at Notre Dame, or your back yard? Why are some considered wilder than others, and why is wilderness such an attractive idea? Writers, historians, painters, photographers, and politicians have described American landscapes as wild to great effect, in concert with identities of gender, class, race, and nation. This class will explore how the idea of wilderness - and the places associated with that idea - has developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine how wilderness has supported the growth of a national identity but largely failed to recognize the diversity of the American people. Course themes include: 1) developing the wilderness idea; 2) national parks and the problem of wilderness; 3) wilderness experience and politics; and 4) wilderness narratives. Readings will range from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to Edward Abbey and Jon Krakauer, and there will be a strong visual culture component. For their final project students will choose a wild place of their own to interpret.
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3.00 Credits
This course will look at protest movements for civil rights and other related issues, focusing on the 20th century, especially the second half. One central theme will be the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. How did race, gender, class, religion, and region impact the strategies, goals, and reception of various threads of black struggles for full citizenship? In addition, we will explore previous and later generations of African American activism, as well as other protest movements in the post WWII period. How did the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s draw on early 20th century activism and leadership? What directions did African American protest movements take after the late 1960s? How did other civil rights, racial and ethnic consciousness, and social reform movements in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s develop from their own historical experiences and in relationship to other protest movements?
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3.00 Credits
America is Indian Country! Our identity is tied to both real American Indian people and romanticized ideas about them. Anglo Americans liked to play Indian but they also claimed a right to places, land, and water. All of this presented a variety of problems for Native Americans over time. This course examines Native Americans and their constant adaptation and survival from European contact through the 20th century, as well as Anglo America¿s cooption of Native resources, traditions, and images. It explores themes of Native American creation, treaties, education, sovereignty, culture, literature, humor, art, and activism. We will address national issues but also recognize their are over 500 distinct cultural and linguistic groups who are the indigenous people of the modern United States. Questions we will explore include why Native people are sovereign but also U.S. Citizens, why Indian mascots are such a hot issue, and how Native people have come to run so many Casinos. This course is the history and culture course that brings the first Americans together with the rest of America.
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