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Course Criteria
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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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3.00 Credits
This course is a survey of the history of Roman Catholicism in the United States from colonial times to the present. We will consider, among others, the following topics: immigrant and ethnic Catholicism, women in the Church, Catholic social reform, devotional and parish life, and the relationship between Catholicism and American democracy.
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3.00 Credits
The Labor Questions " Who does the work? Who reaps the rewards? And "Who makes the decisions?" are central to any society, and this course explores how those questions have been answered throughout the history of the United States of America. "Working for a Living in the U.S." will introduce you to the major themes, events, organizations, individuals, and scholarly controversies in American labor history, from 1776 to the present. We will study the diversity of the working-class experience in the U.S. by exploring the past from multiple perspectives, and we will analyze competing interpretations put forth by labor historians over the past half-century. The workers, workplaces, communities, institutions, and issues will range widely over the semester, but we will investigate some core themes for the duration: issues of power, structure, and agency, from the workplace to Washington, D.C.; workers' wide-ranging efforts to forge organizations, namely labor unions, to represent their collective interests; intersections between class, race, and gender at work, at home, at play, and in politics; and tensions between capitalism, industrialization, and democracy in U.S. history.
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3.00 Credits
This course is about understanding American culture and its history, taking religion into account as one important factor among many - but one often neglected. Subjects include how religion has interacted with just about everything else in the culture, from politics and warfare to intellectual life, ideals, morality, science, schooling, race, immigration, ethnicity, family, sexuality, and so forth.
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3.00 Credits
What does it mean to be a slave in America? Were African-Americans the only slaves in America? Are indentured servants, captives, or laborers in company towns free? Are they slaves? This course examines slavery and other forms of unfree labor in the United States. Through lectures and discussions, the class will investigate unfree labor in American history - chattel slavery in the South and New England, Puritan captives in French Canada, Indian slave trade in the South and Southwest, indentured servants in Virginia, and company towns in the post-war South and West. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to explore how chattel slavery in America fit into a global context, how modernity was related to slavery, and how the experiences of African-American slaves differed by time and region in the United States. After a broad survey of slavery and unfree labor in the United States, students will be prepared to tackle the following questions: What does it mean to be free in America? What was the impact of slavery and unfree labor on American politics and society?
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3.00 Credits
This course traces the roots of southern, antebellum culture by exploring the centrality of the relationships between sex, manliness, and slavery in the development of south from 1619 to 1865. By examining how European men viewed their own sexuality and that of European women in contrast to that of African men and women this course seeks to examine the complex racial and gendered identities at the center of southern culture. The underlying current of the class is to understand the complexity with which racial and gendered identities defined relationships and culture in the south. Using primary and secondary sources, we will critically engage the debates about slavery, racism, gender, and class in southern culture. We will reevaluate the historiographic arguments on American racism. We will take the notion of "southern gentlemen" to task, juxtaposing their responsibility as patriarchs to the ugly underbelly of slavery, race, and sexual exploitation. Our efforts in this class will be to understand the contours of the relationships between sexual control, manliness, and racism. We will explore the daily lives of men and women who lived during the time. A variety of perspectives will constitute our sources about slavery, including those of blacks, free and enslaved, as well as planters, abolitionists, women, and yeomen.
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the political, economic, cultural, and social history of the Great Depression and New Deal years in the United States, from the stock market crash of 1929 to the beginning of World War II in 1941.
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3.00 Credits
Few periods in American history have been as controversial as the 1960s. Sometimes called the "Long Sixties," it runs conceptually from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and was a turbulent time. Concentrating on politics and society, this course explores the major personalities and events, including Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the Vietnam War, the breakdown of the liberal consensus, the rebirth of the conservative movement, and national movements led by youths, women, and African Americans. Although the emphasis is on the U.S., the course also visits several major international issues. There are two goals for students: acquiring knowledge about the period, and developing analytical tools to form their own judgments about it. Toward the first goal, students will encounter a combination of readings, videos, mini-lectures, and class discussions. Toward the second, they will be exposed to four different approaches: (1) discussing primary documents and writing a paper on some of them; (2) studying three small-scale case studies; (3) examining the large-scale phenomenon of protest; and (4) reading the memoirs of a Cabinet member, hence gaining an insider's view of the life and activities in the White House.
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3.00 Credits
This course will explore the creation of contemporary consumer culture in the United States. Beginning in the late 1880s, the nature of buying, selling and consuming was fundamentally transformed in the United States. After a brief examination of the broader history of consumption, this course will explore the changes in production, marketing, retailing, and consumption from the Gilded Age to the present. Next it will trace the ways in which those changes have influenced broader cultural, institutional, and political developments throughout the twentieth century. A particular emphasis will be placed on the ways in which patterns of consumption helped define and redefine categories of race, class and gender.
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3.00 Credits
This survey course explores the role of coerced African labor in the birth of the Atlantic World. What do we mean by Atlantic World? What do we mean by slavery? What varied and nuanced claims to humanity did Africans make against a dehumanizing labor system? How did sexuality and gender norms shape the experiences of slavery for men and women? Together we will examine slave autobiographies, travel diaries, and pictorial sources to address these questions. We will focus on the peoples of West Africa, Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean who were enslaved from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.
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