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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Sport, a major part of American entertainment and culture today, has roots that extend back to the colonial period. This course will provide an introduction to the development of American sport, from the horse-racing and games of chance in the colonial period through to the rise of contemporary sport as a highly-commercialized entertainment spectacle. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, we will explore the ways that American sport has influenced and been influenced by economics, politics, popular culture, and society, including issues of race, gender and class. Given Notre Dame's tradition in athletics, we will explore the university's involvement in this historical process.
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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 actively to explore the past sensibilities of various groups toward the quality of their air, water, and land; the passionate discussions of philosophers, theologians, and social and natural scientists about resource use, the safety of the environment, and long-term prospects for humanity; and the customs, laws, and managerial systems that guided use of the environment. Historians have also increasingly paid attention to the ways environmental factors have affected the course history: the effects of the distribution of water, foodstuffs, wood, minerals, and of changes in climate or endemic disease. This course will range widely -- in methodology from the history of ideas to paleoclimatology, geographically from the ancient near east to modern America, topically from wood-cutting rights in medieval France to the rise of the organic farming movement and water-allocation laws in the 20th century American west. Lecture discussion format.
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3.00 Credits
African American History II is a course that examines the broad range of problems and experiences of African Americans from the close of the American Civil War to the 1980s. We will explore both the relationship of blacks to the larger society and the inner dynamics of the black community. We will devote particular attention to Reconstruction, the migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north, and the political machinations of the African American community. The course will utilize historical documents in the form of articles and other secondary sources. Classes will be conducted as lecture-discussions.
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3.00 Credits
This course covers the main developments in American foreign policy from World War II through the end of the Cold War. The principal topics of investigation will be wartime diplomacy and the origins of the Cold War; the Cold War and containment in Europe and Asia; Eisenhower/Dulles diplomacy; Kennedy-Johnson and Vietnam; Nixon-Kissinger and détente; Carter and the diplomacy of Human Rights; Reagan and the revival of containment; Bush and the end of the Cold War.
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3.00 Credits
Topics may include representations of sexuality in movies and advertising; new courtship practices among unmarried heterosexuals (from courting to dating to hooking up); changing concepts of same-sex love (from inversion to homosexuality to gay liberation to LGBTQ); the demographic shift to smaller families; the twentieth-century movements for and against birth control and legal abortion; and the late-twentieth-century politicization of sexual issues.
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3.00 Credits
This lecture course will survey major developments in American thought from the later nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Emphasis will fall on ideas about religion, society, politics, and natural science and on the institutions and social contexts of intellectual life, with an eye toward understanding the roots of our present ways of thinking.
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3.00 Credits
Is America, as historian Geoffrey Perret contends, a "country made by war"? Regardless of one's opinion, a systematic study of America's wars is essential to either confirm or refute the above statement and obtain a more complete understanding of the nation. There have certainly been ample historical occurrences to support Perret's assertion over the last century, and this course will investigate the validity of the question by examining the modern American military experience from after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 to the present. We will explore the causes, conduct, and consequences of the major military conflicts of the 20th century in which the U.S. was involved or that had a significant impact on the U.S., using traditional historical materials. We will also read several battlefield memoirs to further examine the conflicts at the tactical level and also explore the human dimension of war. Using a fundamental thesis to address war at the political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels, the goal of the course will be to gain a better understanding of the relationship among the different levels as well as the importance of each. As a part of their discovery process, students will take three essay exams and write a research paper assessing the combat effectiveness of a particular unit that existed during this period to assist them in determining, developing, and delivering a response to Perret's statement.
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3.00 Credits
How might thinking of the African American increase our understanding of U.S. society's diversity and its relation to the modern world? If such a task could be addressed by looking at the work of one thinker, who would it be? This course offers writer and philosopher W.E.B Du Bois as one avenue to answering these questions. Not only did Du Bois predict that the problem of the twentieth century would be the "problem of the color line," studying for his PhD at the University of Berlin and Harvard University in the 1890s. Not only did he found the NAACP and gain the respect of thinkers and activists like Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein. W.E.B. Du Bois was also a prolific writer of philosophy, fiction, correspondence, editorials, novels, and lectures, resulting in a 70-year career and over 175,000 pages of published and unpublished writings. This course will only read (and, in some cases, view or listen to) some of the key moments in Du Bois's intellectual career, primarily Souls of Black Folk, John Brown, Dark Princess, selections from Black Reconstruction and Darkwater. We will examine how he reconfigured philosophical concepts, literary genres and tropes in specific contexts to think in innovative ways about African Americans and our modern world in general. We will also contextualize Du Bois in relation to national and international figures in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Ultimately, we will consider how his ideas can inform critical thinking about the present. Grades will consist of class participation and writing assignments based on particular themes that encountered in Du Bois's thought.
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3.00 Credits
Popular notions of the South tend to portray it as a region lost in time, trapped within backwards traditions and with a hostile view of the modern world. Yet, no region of the country has experienced such sweeping social, cultural and economic changes as the American South between the Civil War and the 1980s. Over the course of that period, southerners witnessed rapid economic transformation from plantation economy to Sunbelt industrialism; the rise and fall of Jim Crow and the tremendous racial strife that accompanied these changes; a literary flourishing brought on by what writers called the the region's unique sense of tragedy and loss; the movement of southern folk life away from the farms and mill towns into urban areas; and the rising appeal of southern politics and culture to a larger national community in the modern day. This course will examine these and other developments in the context of American history, casting a comparative eye toward how other societies have sought to embrace modernization while clinging to a variety of traditions, real and imagined.
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3.00 Credits
Arguably the study of the American Civil War is a suitable training ground for novice historians, for traditionally, a historian must learn to examine events and issues from varying perspectives. Indeed, in this course, emphasis lies not only on the events of the period, but also on the interpretation of those events by different interest groups. Students are expected not only to learn the facts of the era, but also to think about the consequences of events on different sections and different peoples. This course divides the period into three sections: the coming of the Civil War, the War, and Reconstruction. A test follows the end of each section; half of the final exam will be on the Reconstruction section and the rest will be comprehensive. In addition to the tests, students will write a short paper and a short book review.
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