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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
As a survey of the Catholic presence in the United States during "the American century," the focus of the class will be on the ways Catholics integrated their national and religious identities. Defining American culture broadly, we will discuss Catholic politicians and laborers, monks and nuns, pacifists and cold warriors. What was the relationship between Catholic spirituality, cultural criticism and social reform? What consequences did conflict over sex and gender have in the realm of church authority and lay practice? Why did Catholics stop going to confession in the mid-sixties? We will examine the challenges of being American and Catholic by exploring Catholic themes in American popular music, film, and fiction; Catholic social teaching on the economy and nuclear war; and the changes in Catholic religious practice and self-understanding inspired by the events of the 1960s, including the Second Vatican Council and the civil rights movement. Profiles of "everyday Catholics" drawn from primary historical sources will be complemented by brief excerpts from the writings of influential thinkers and activists such as John Ryan, Dorothy Day, John Courtney Murray, Thomas Merton, Richard Rodriguez, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and Cathleen Kaveny. Two class sessions will be devoted to Notre Dame's role in this story, including the vocation and career of Father Ted Hesburgh, while three class sessions will be devoted to contemporary challenges facing Catholics and the Church.
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3.00 Credits
The ultimate goal of this course is to move through the historical process with students: curiosity, researching, organizing, argument, writing. This course incorporates both meanings of the phrase "history-making." First, students will investigate the events surrounding a specific riot in 1855 Louisville, Kentucky. Called "Bloody Monday" by those few who know of it at all, the riot took place on an election day when xenophobic nativists targeted businesses, dwellings, and churches of immigrant Catholics. Students will learn the details of the event as well as those groups that converged so violently. Important corollaries such as immigration, urban space, religious conflict, ethnicity, politics, and violence are also a part of the students' readings and discussions. The course will seek answers to the usual questions of history: What happened? Who was involved? Why did it happen in this particular way? The other way in which this course involves "making history" is by integrating the process by which historians investigate and understand the past. In addition to a heavy emphasis on primary documents and secondary materials relating to the riot, students will read a variety of materials on topics that relate to an anti-Catholic riot in an antebellum city. The goals of the investigation will also include crafting arguments, imagining historical events, innovative techniques to present data, and novel approaches to material. Students in this course will also participate in several activities designed to stimulate thinking about the past. The questions to which this aspect of the course may offer answers include: "How did this event compare to other violence in the nineteenth century U.S.?" and "How have past scholars treated (or ignored) this event?"
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3.00 Credits
How Latinos are racialized often defies the common understanding of race as either black or white. This course attempts to complicate this debate by exploring the historical, political, economic and social structures that determine the ethnic and racial stratification of Latinos in the United States. Topics include the multigenerational experience of Latinos, contemporary immigration, Latino youth and gender.
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3.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to the new field of environmental history. While many people think "The Environment" suddenly became important with the first Earth Day in 1970 (or a few years earlier), environmental issues have in fact long been of central importance. In recent decades historians have begun to actively explore the past sensibilities of various groups toward their surroundings and fellow creatures. They have also increasingly paid attention to the ways environmental factors have affected history. This course will range widely, from world history to the story of a single river, from arguments about climate change to the significance of pink flamingos, and will survey a number of types of history including cultural, demographic, religious, and animal.
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3.00 Credits
This course considers the history of New World exploration and settlement by Europeans from the 15th century to the 18th century. It examines the process of colonization in a wide variety of cultural and geographic settings. It explores the perspectives of Indians, Europeans, and slaves with a particular emphasis on the consequences of interracial contacts. We will discuss the goals and perceptions of different groups and individuals as keys to understanding the violent conflict that became a central part of the American experience. Lectures, class discussions, readings, and films will address gender, racial, class, and geographic variables in the peopling (and de-peopling) of English North America.
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3.00 Credits
This seminar style course deals with the interaction between the legal system and social change in the United States from the 1600s to the 1980s. Primary emphasis is given to the 19th century and 20th century, two periods where American legal culture took on much of its fundamental character and adjusted to significant social change. Main themes include the relationships between law and development, individual rights in the public and private spheres the development of the legal profession, the post-New Deal state, and the various U.S. "rights" movements. Reading consists of primary sources documents and a short survey text. Grades will be based on a series of short papers and classroom discussion. Prior knowledge of American history is helpful but not required.
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3.00 Credits
Few American regions have generated as many cultural narratives, myths, and icons as the trans-Mississippi West. This course takes both the reality and the romance of the West seriously, asking students to examine how the American conquest of the West inspired storytelling traditions that distorted and shaped the region's history. To get at this interaction, we will read novels, histories, and first-hand accounts as well as view several Hollywood westerns. The class is reading and discussion intensive. Students will write several short papers as well as a longer final essay.
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3.00 Credits
This course covers the main developments in American foreign relations from the Spanish-American War in 1898 through World War II. It traces the emergence of the United States as a major world power and examines in some detail how the United States became involved in the two world wars. A recurring theme will be the major traditions in America foreign policy and the ways in which these traditions influenced policy makers in the early years of the "American Century."
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3.00 Credits
Sexuality, like other areas of social life, has a history. Yet historians have only written about the history of sex for the last 40 years or so. This course will both introduce students to a variety of current themes in the history of sexuality and invite them to consider how they themselves might research and write that history. The class will survey recent topics in the history of sexuality from first colonial settlement to the end of the Victorian era. Issues we may consider include different religions' attitudes towards sexuality (the Puritans were not anti-sex!), how different cultures' views of sex shaped relations between colonists and Indians, why sex was an important factor in establishing laws about slavery in Virginia, birth control and abortion practices, changing patterns of courtship, men who loved men and women who loved women, and why the average number of children in American families fell by 50 percent between 1790 and 1890. Over the course of the semester, students will also design a small research proposal on some aspect of the history of American sexuality prior to 1890. Written assignments will include a weekly journal, midterm and final examinations; a book review; and a small research project.
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3.00 Credits
Students will investigate the political debates--and simultaneous examinations of democracy's character--that have animated American reformers and intellectuals since the Civil War. The focus will be on these political traditions, not the studies of voter behavior or policy implementation that also constitute an important part of political history. The course will begin with discussion of the debate over slavery and Reconstruction, and move through the "social question" of the late 19th century, Progressive reform in the early 20th century, the New Deal, the origins of modern conservatism, and various post-World War II social reform movements. Readings will include court cases, memoirs, speeches, and a sampling of the philosophical and historical literature.
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