Courses
Fall 2008
INSIDE COURSES (courses offered in the Department of American Studies)
INTRO TO AMERICAN STUDIES
AMST 20100
TR 9:30-10:45
E. Doss
This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, emphasizing key texts and methods for critically understanding what "America" means (and to whom), and what it means to be "American." How have ideas about race, gender, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, and class shaped the making and meaning of America and Americans? What are the dominant myths and values that Americans seem to share? What is the American Dream? In particular, this class considers the ways in which concepts of "America" and "American" are performed: how notions of citizenship and national identity are constructed through particular acts and actions from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to watching football, going shopping, marching on Washington, and touring America's National Parks.
NEWS IN AMERICAN LIFE
AMST 30109
M. Storin
MW 3-4:15
Restrictions: Departmental Approval Required
Track 3
This course is being taught by the former Managing Editor of the Chicago Tribune. The greatest personal impact of the technology explosion of the late 20th century has been the information delivery systems that bombard Americans with more news about more subjects in more places than once was imaginable. But the basic ingredients and selling of news are rooted in a cyclical tradition that often has shifted from advocacy to objectivity, from intellectual to frivolous, from personalities to ideas. Now, all these components are available through print and electronic delivery both simultaneously and instantaneously.
This course seeks to promote an understanding of modern media by examining the goals and motivations of news makers, the power of instant information, the future of news delivery and an examination of how the traditional principles of fairness, privacy and ethics are treated. Students will read several books and newspaper articles dealing with the history and the business of the media, and will use daily newspapers throughout the course.
There will be two examinations and a lengthy critical essay. The course also will include some guest speakers.
THE CRAFT OF JOURNALISM
AMST 30118
R. Schmuhl
M 3:00 -5:30
Track 3
This class will focus on how print and broadcast journalists work-how they think and act as well as the problems they face in delivering news, analysis, and commentary. Several sessions will be devoted to presentations by visiting correspondents, editors, and producers, explaining their approaches to specific stories and circumstances. In addition, students will discuss the issues and questions raised in some books and duplicated readings.
A lengthy term paper and a shorter analytical assignment will be required. Students will also be responsible for leading some sessions by preparing questions and points to consider. A final exam is mandatory.
MEN, WOMEN & WORK
AMST 30132
S. White
MW 11:45-1:00
Track 2
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.
PERSUASION, COMMENTARY & CRITICISM
AMST 30146
J. Colwell
MW 1:30
Restrictions: Departmental Approval Required
Track 3
This course will consider the roles of persuasion, commentary, and criticism in contemporary American culture and will explore the techniques of these forms of expression. Students will prepare and discuss their own writing assignments, including opinion columns, editorials, and critical reviews of performances or books. Ethics and responsibilities in contemporary American journalism in expression of opinions also will be explored. Assignments will serve as the examinations in this course, which is taught by a political columnist for the South Bend Tribune who also serves as host of public affairs programs on WNIT-TV, Public Broadcasting. Open to American Studies majors and Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy minors by permission. Other applicants must submit writing samples for review
“MIXED RACE AMERICA” – new course
AMST 30153
J. Ruiz
TR 12:30-1:45
Track 2
Despite popular images of American as a "melting" both of races and ethnicities, our institutions, values, and practices have often tried to create or maintain spatial and social distance between groups defined as racially different. This course will explore that ways in which Americans have transgressed those boundaries or found other ways of interacting across cultural lines, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine popular cultural perceptions of people of mixed ancestry, their social experiences, the development of various mixed-ancestry communities, and historical attempts to limit interracial socializing, relationships, and marriage. These issues were and are deeply imbedded in debates over the meaning of race, gender expectations and ideas about sex and sexuality. We will also pay close attention to how minority communities have understood people of mixed ancestry in the United States, and how mixed-race identities intersect with African American, Native American, Asian, White, and Latino identities.
AMERICAN MEN, AMERICAN WOMEN
AMST 30155
C. Meaney
TR 3:30-4:45
Track 2
What does it mean to be male or female in America? How different are our ideas about gender from those of other cultures? This course will focus on the 20th century and look at the origins and development of masculine and feminine roles in the United States. How much have they changed over time and what aspects have been retained? We will explore the ways that cultural images, political changes, and economic needs have shaped the definition of acceptable behavior and life choices based on gender. Topics will range from Victorian ideals through the Jazz Age and war literature to movie Westerns, '50s television families, and '60s youth culture; and into recent shifts with women's rights, extreme sports, and talk shows.
THE CITY IN AMERICAN CULTURE – new course
AMST 30156
C. Meissner
TR 12:30-1:45
Track 1
Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that all cities are governed by a marvelous and complex order. This order, she said, is composed of movement and change, and though it is life, not art, we may call it the form of the city, and liken it to the dance. The City in American Culture looks closely at the origins and continuation of that dance as it analyzes some of the forces which have shaped and continue to shape Americas cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas. The course will center on a number of literary and nonliterary texts and be guided by a series of questions such as: Does urbanization thrive on a culture of poverty? Are twentieth-century gated communities a continuation of the brownstone mansion? Does the American Dream require vivid urban poverty? Is there such a thing as enough? Who lives in cities today? How are societal changes and the goals of urban development rewriting the role of cities? How has gentrification and evolving patterns of metropolitanism/cosmopolitanism effected the modern city and its composite neighborhoods. Why and how do cities compete for target communities such as arts, gay/lesbian, minority, young, urban and professional? The course will have a written, research, and a practical/experiential component.
POPULAR CULTURE- new course
AMST 30157
J. Ruiz
MW 3:00 - 4:15
Track 1
Drawing upon critical work in history, cultural studies, and American studies, this course will explore the history and meanings of the U.S.-Mexican border since 1848. We will pay special attention to American popular culture (located in film, literature, art, music, and even dime novels) to understand the myriad—often contradictory—roles that the border has played in the popular imagination of the United States.
CONFRONTING HOMELESSNESS IN THE U.S.
AMST 43102
B. Giamo
TR 2:00 -3:15
Track 1 or 2
The purpose of this interdisciplinary seminar is to examine the conditions of extreme poverty and homelessness within the broader context of American culture and society. In order to confront the nature of these conditions, this seminar will draw upon insights from literature, history, documentary nonfiction, and the social sciences. We will focus on the degree of permanence and change in our approach to both traditional and contemporary forms of the social problem. In addition, the causes of extreme poverty and homelessness will be explored, as well as the various cultural representations that work to organize social perceptions of the situation.
There will be an experiential or community service learning dimension to the seminar as well. All students are required to make at least 10 weekly visits to either the Center for the Homeless or the Hope Rescue Mission in South Bend (30 hours), and complete a systematic documentary journal.
THE MEANING OF THINGS
AMST 43137
S. White
MW 1:30-2:45
Track 1
“The Meaning of Things” asks how objects as diverse as an ‘heirloom’ quilt, a pair of jeans or an iPod acquire meaning and value. This course will introduce students to a range of practices relating to consumption in American history from the colonial period to the present. We will investigate the gendered aspects of production, marketing, buying and using goods as these impact not only on gender, but also on the construction of class, ethnic and ‘racial’ identities. Students will work on small collaborative projects as a foundation for writing substantive individual research papers on a topic of their choice.
POST 9/11 AMERICAN FICTION AND CULTURE - new course
AMST 43140
C. Meissner
TR 11:00 – 12:15
Track 1
In speaking of the after-effects of the first World War, the American novelist Henry James said: “The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.” Writers such as Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Phillip Roth, the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, film makers, politicians and intellectuals have all portrayed the post 9/11 world in language similar to James’s post-apocalyptic vision. This course looks at contemporary American culture and society and asks whether or not there is a definable post 9/11 narrative and aesthetic. We’ll address the ways in which the world has changed since 9/11 and how those changes have impacted daily life, local communities, the national consciousness, and global affairs. Discussion of these changes will be situated in our examination of major, post 9/11 novels, works of art, film and other media, formal governmental publication and policies, and religious writings. This course will have some short writing assignments, class presentation, and a final, research paper.
GENDER AND AMERICAN CATHOLICISM
Amst 30158
K. Cummings
TR 9:30-10:45
Track: 2
This course surveys gender and American Catholicism, focusing on the following themes: the role of religious belief and practice in shaping Catholics’ understanding of gender differences; gender in the context of family and religious life; masculinity, sport, and American culture; embodiment; gender, education, and work; gender and sainthood; and Catholicism and feminism. The class format will involve discussion of assigned primary and secondary sources, supplemented by occasional background lectures. We will take several “field trips,” including a visit to the Notre Dame Archives for a presentation on Catholic material culture, a tour of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart to enhance our understanding of church architecture and devotional life before the Second Vatican Council, an evening at South Bend’s Catholic Worker House, and a visit to Catholic Chicago, an interactive exhibit at the Chicago History Museum.
OUTSIDE COURSES (courses offered in departments other than the Department of American Studies)
ENGLISH
THE REAL CONTEMPORARY NOVEL: AMERICAN FICTION 2000-PRESENT
AMST 30244
J. Hess
MWF 1:55 – 2:45
Track 1
*with approval of faculty advisor in American Studies
Many “Contemporary Fiction” classes conclude with works published around the time that you were born in the mid to late 1980s. This course focuses on novels published during the decade in which you are living and examines the interpretive difficulties raised by such works. Without being able to rely on an established history of scholarly criticism or their place among the so-called “great books” of civilization, the reader of contemporary novels must actively consider why these works are worth studying as well as how they function. The major aims of this course are to introduce you to these exciting novels and to provide you with the critical and interpretive framework for determining what contemporary literature is and why it matters. We will focus on eight novels and novellas examining the intersections between self and society and between literary art and the popular cultures of film, television, hip-hop, rock, and comic books.
Readings include novels and novellas by Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, David Markson, and Toni Morrison. The course also includes a screening of the film adaptation of Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Because this course is intended for non-majors, each unit will include introductions to the basic tools of literary study including close reading, how to write a literary argument, how to incorporate secondary criticism and theory, and the basic principles of film and television. Course requirements include two 5-7 page papers and one 7-10 page paper.
CHICAGO IN WORDS
AMST 30245
T. Thorpe
MWF 11:45 – 12:35
Track 1
Early twentieth-century Chicago was famous for its railways and stockyards, jazz and gangsters. The city saw the creation of great industrial fortunes and the birth in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World. The literature taken up in this class brings the dynamic contradictions of the Chicago experience to life. We will look at work by Jane Addams, Nelson Algren, Sherwood Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Ward, and Richard Wright, covering a range of literary expression from impassioned journalism, to poetry, novels, and drama. We will consider the relation of modernism to realism. We will look at the ways in which Chicago capitalism altered nature, challenged traditional forms of identity, and created new forms of urban community. We will spend a week exploring Chicago’s jazz and blues, while we will also look at the 1932 gangster film Scarface, screenplay by Chicago journalist and Oscar winner Ben Hecht. Chicago is a city of tremendous vitality and shocking brutality that has reinvented itself time and again, and the writers we will read have taken up this task of urban invention with a shared urgency and a wide range of voices. Course requirements: Active class participation, short response papers, creative responses (poems), a class presentation of a scene from Big White Fog by Theodore Ward, and an 8-10 page paper.
AMERICAN NOVEL
AMST 30246
J. Staud
MWF 9:35 - 10:25
Track 1
We will read, discuss, and study selected novels of significant importance within the American literary tradition. As we explore these novels within their historical and cultural context, we will consider the various reasons for their place within the canon of American literature. Indeed, we will scrutinize the very nature of this literary canon and self-consciously reflect on the inevitably arbitrary nature of this, or any, reading list. Even so, we will see, I hope, that these authors share deep engagement with ideas and themes common to American literature and do so, through their art, in ways that both teach and delight.
TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN DRAMA
AMST 30248
J. Ulin
MW 4:30 – 5:45
Track 1
This course will focus on key works of modern and contemporary American drama from three plays by Eugene O'Neill (Desire Under the Elms, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night) to Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize winning 2003 play Anna in the Tropics. In addition to critical readings and selected European plays on reserve, focal playwrights include Edward Albee, Sam Shepherd, Paula Vogel, Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdez, David Mamet, August Wilson, Josefina López , Yellow Robe, Anna Devere Smith, Eve Ensler, and Moisis Kaufmann. Requirements will include group staged scenes, journal entries on selected plays, and three 4 page papers. In addition, students are required to attend one campus play over the course of the semester and write a written critique of the production and performance.
AMERICAN MODERNISM
AMST 30249
TR 12:30 -1:45
Track 1
Discussions of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century literary and cultural movement of modernism often center on those qualities of the movement described in the work of early modernist literary critics, such as Harry Levin or Edmund Wilson. Such examinations emphasize the modern movement's experiments in form, structure, linguistic representation, characterization, etc., while paying much less attention to the role of the modernist movement in the larger context of a given culture. In this course, we will explore the significance of the modern movement from the perspective of American culture, as well as the manner and meaning of American literary participation in the movement. To that end, we will consider not only the work of authors generally accepted as modernists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider the role of authors such as Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank, of the early Chicago Renaissance (1910-1925), and a number of authors from the Harlem Renaissance. We will examine the work of these authors not only in the context of modernism, but also as it relates to many issues of the day, including progressivism, primitivism, race and ethnicity, immigration, cosmopolitanism vs. regionalism, and the importance of the vernacular, in addition to the question of "Americanness" and its importance to an understanding of American literature during this time.
Considering these different vantage points in American literary modernism, we will try to imagine the contours of "American modernisms," and draw some conclusions about their significance within the larger modernist context. In so doing, we'll seek to arrive at a more comprehensive, more nuanced perspective on the meaning of the modern in American literature and culture.Course Texts: Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence; Willa Cather, O Pioneers!; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter; Waldo Frank, Holiday; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Ernest Hemingway, Torrents of Spring; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Jean Toomer, Cane; William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!Course Requirements: Two 10-page essays, one mini-presentation, one larger presentation
AMERICAN FILM
AMST 40205
W. Krier
TR 3:30 – 4:45
Track 1
Presentations and discussions of the several genres of film produced in America since the early 1900s.
Our America: African American Lit
AMST 40225
A. Irving
TR 2:00-3:15
Track 1 or 2
This interdisciplinary course is interested in the shaping of national identity and the historical, cultural, political, and moral assumptions about America that facilitate such a shaping. We will read twentieth-century social science and African-American literature with a focus on how subjectivity is created, rights are developed, social citizenship is constructed, and Americaness is determined. We will use critical race theory to explore the relationship between literature, history and law; the American obsession with race; the function of welfare, prisons, and houses; and competing representations of entitlement. What is the relationship between social policy and black subjectivity, social perceptions and political practice? In light of the way blackness is often construed as the ultimate sign of race in America, how do the texts we will read approach the American political landscape to offer a critique of power, identity and social subjectivity in a manner that interrogates whiteness and its ascribed universality. Course texts may include work by: Lorraine Hansberry, Linda Faye Williams, Jacob Lawrence, Amiri Baraka, Hazel Carby, Jessie Fauset, David Roediger, Malcolm X, and Evelyn Higginbotham.
Homes and Haunts
AMST 40247
J. Ulin
MW 3:00 - 4:15
Track 1 or 3
This course will examine plays, novels, short stories, and poetry set in tenements, asylums, prisons, boarding houses, and haunted houses and will attend to these texts alongside contemporaneous U.S. social and political ideologies of home. Focal authors include Crane, James, Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Nabokov, Morrison, O'Neill, Plath, Kesey, Welty, McCullers, Malamud, Brooks, Cunningham, Alexie, and Alvarez. Students will write one 5-6 page paper and one 12-15 page research paper which will be designed in consultation with me over the course of the semester.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Presidential Leadership
AMST 30400
J. Roos
MW 3:00 – 4:15
Track 3
This course examines the role of the presidency in the American regime and its change over time. Particular attention will be given to expectations about presidents through the course of American political history. Beginning with questions about the original design and role of the presidency, the course turns to history. Beginning with questions about the original design and role of the presidency, the course turns to consideration of the role of leadership styles for change and continuity in American politics. Finally, cases of presidential leadership are studied to comprehend the way leadership and political context interact. This course will examine such phenomena as legislative organization, roll call behavior, representation, congressional elections, and the role of political parties and interest groups in Congress.
American Congress
AMST 30423
J. Griffin
MW 8:00 – 9:15
Track 3
This course will approach the United States Congress from several perspectives. First Congress will be viewed from the perspective of the American Founding. Then we will read several major studies Congress including Mayhew's Congress: the Electoral Connection, Cox and McCubbins' Legislative Leviathan, and Jacobson's Congressional Elections. Students will also learn how to do basic roll call analysis through short data assignments. In addition they will prepare a complete Legislative History, using primary materials. In addition to these writing assignments, there will be a mid-term and a final.
Introduction to Public Policy
AMST 30418
L. Ayala
TR 12:30 – 1:45
Track 3
The objective of this course is to introduce students to the process of public policy formation in American politics. The course will be divided into three parts. The first section will encompass a brief review of some of the more important mechanisms of American politics that impact on the legislative process (i.e. political participation, interest groups, congressional elections, etc.). We will then engage in a general review how such factors have impacted the direction and tone of federal public policy over the last 30 years. The final two sections of the course will be devoted to detailed analysis of two public policy areas of particular interest to younger voters, education reform and drug laws. Building on the earlier readings and the analytical tools developed, we will examine the current debates and prospects for reform in these policy areas, with an eye towards understanding the political realities of public policy formation.
US Foreign Policy
AMST 30428
D. Lindley
MW 1:30 - 2:45
Track 3
The United States is the most powerful state in the world today. American foreign policy is important for US citizens, but it also affects whether others go to war, whether they will win their wars, whether they receive economic aid or go broke, and whether they will swept by famine and disease. With these issues at stake, we want to know what determines U.S. foreign policy? What is the national interest? When do we go to war? Would you send U.S. soldiers into war? If so, into which wars and for what reasons? How do our economic policies affect others? Does trade help or hurt the U.S. economy and its citizens? To answer these questions, we first study several theories about foreign policy ranging from decision-making to organizational politics. We then examine the U.S. foreign policy process, including the president, Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and public opinion. To see these theories and the policy process in action, we turn to the history of U.S. foreign policy, from Washington's farewell address through the World Wars and the Cold War to the Gulf War. We then study several major issue areas, including weapons of mass destruction, trade and economics, and the environment. Finally, we develop and debate forecasts and grand strategies for the future. This course requires a paper about the history of American foreign policy, a paper about a current policy problem, as well as a midterm and a comprehensive final.
Black Chicago Politics
AMST 30429
D. Pinderhughes
TR 9:30-10:45
Track 2 or 3
This course introduces students to the vast, complex and exciting dimensions of Black Chicago Politics. First, institutional structures, geographic distribution and population characteristics will inform students about the sociodemograpic background of the African American population in the city. Second, the course explores varying types of political expression that have developed over more than a century, including electoral politics, mass movements, partisan politics; it will also examine the impact of the Chicago machine, and of the Washington era on the political and economic status of African Americans in the city. Third, public policy developments in housing, education and criminal justice will be discussed. Fourth, the course also compares Black political standing with other racial and ethnic groups in the city. Finally, the course will introduce students to the long tradition of social science research centered on the city of Chicago.
State of American States
AMST 30436
R. Hero
TR 3:30 – 4:45
Track 3
This course provides a "critical" and comprehensive examination of politics in the states of the U.S., and does so by analyzing topics from several theoretical perspectives. States are major policymakers concerning such central public policies as education, welfare, and criminal justice, among a host of others. There is tremendous variation, yet, at the same time, there are similarities between and among the 50 states in their political l processes and governmental institutions as well as in their public policy concerns and outcomes. The focus of the course is on understanding why the states vary as they do and the consequences of that variation for such core American values as democracy and equality, and how states have different conceptualizations, or different visions or versions, of those core values.
HISTORY
US Foreign Policy since 1945
AMST 30316
Brady
MWF 8:30-9:20
Track 3
Course description coming soon!
History of the American West
AMST 30324
J. Coleman
MW 1:30 – 2:45
Track 2
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.
Mexican-American History
AMST 30336
M. Rodriguez
MW 10:40 - 11:30
Track 2
This course is an introductory survey of Mexican American history in the United States. Primarily focused on events after the Texas Revolution and annexation of the American Southwest, we will consider the problems the Spanish and Mexican settlers faced in their new homeland, as well as the mass migration of Anglo-Americans into the region following annexation. Throughout the course, we will explore the changing nature of Mexican American U.S. citizenship. Other themes and topics examined will include immigration, the growth of agriculture in Texas and California, internal migration, urbanization, discrimination, segregation, language and cultural maintenance, and the development of a U.S.-based Mexican-American politics and culture. Although primarily focused on the American Southwest, Texas, and California, this course also highlights the long history of Mexican American life and work in the Great Lakes and Midwestern United States. We will conclude with the recent history of Mexican and Latin American migration to the United States after 1965, and the changing nature of Mexican-American identity and citizenship within this context
Sport in American History
AMST 30339
J. Soars
MW 11:45 – 1:00
Track 2
port, 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 horseracing and games of chance in the colonial period through 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 also explore the university's involvement in this historical process.
U.S. Civil War Era, 1848 - 1877
AMST 30351
M. DeGruccio
MW 4:30 – 5:45
Track 2
Through intensive reading and writing students will explore the social and cultural history of America's most costly war. We will focus on various topics as they relate to the war: antebellum origins, religion, gender, Lincoln's reasons for waging war, dead bodies, freedmen's families, black soldiers, and the uses of war memory. This will not be a guns-and-generals-smell-the-smoke course, though knowledge of military matters can be helpful. We will ask and try to answer who really "won" and "lost" the war.
United States History, 1900 - 1945
AMST 30352
T. Blantz
MWF 9:35 – 10:25
Track 2
This course explores the political, diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural development of the United States from 1900 to 1945. Major topics will include the background for Progressive reform, the New Nationalism and New Freedom administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the diplomacy of the early twentieth century, the causes and results of World War I, the Republican administrations of the 1920's, the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, isolationism and neutrality in the inter-war period, and the American home front during World War II. There will be a required reading list of approximately seven books, two shorter writing assignments, and three major examinations, including the final.
Revolutionary America
AMST 30373
T. Slaughter
TR 2:00 – 3:15
Track 2
This course examines the American Revolution as a process of change and an event with profound consequences for the history of the American people and the world. It emphasizes conditions and consequences of the Revolution for common people and for those living at the fringes of economic subsistence and political power-laborers, women, slaves, and Indians-in addition to the ambitions of the founding fathers. The long-term preconditions for revolution are considered within the contexts of domestic and international politics. We will focus on the conflict that was the heart of the Revolutionary experience and that was the fundamental legacy of the war for American society. The course is decidedly NOT military history.
Archaeology of African Diaspora
AMST 30375
M. Hauser
MW 11:45 – 1:00
Track 2
This course will introduce students to organizations and movements arising from and on behalf of black populations in the Diaspora, including the United States and various nations in Latin America and the Caribbean. "Movements" is defined broadly in this course to include both historical and contemporary instances of collective resistance, revolt, and rebellion as well as sustained collective activism and organizing around artistic, cultural, social, intellectual, political, and/or religious agendas aimed at bringing about black liberation, social justice, and cultural/ethnic/racial awareness and pride. Among the topics to be considered are varying expressions of black nationalism within the U.S., Rastafarianism in Jamaica, black identity groups in Brazil, and black organizational presence and community building on the internet. Readings and class discussions will encourage students to think about blackness (and identity and mobilization more generally) in global terms, searching for points of connection across international borders along with points of disconnect based on differing historical, cultural, and socio-political realities and differing local understandings of race and ethnicity.
U.S. in the 1960s
AMST 30386
D. Swartz
TR 9:30 – 10:45
Track 2 or 3
"History with a capital H had come down to earth," wrote New Leftist Todd Gitlin of the 1960s, "People were living with a supercharged density." This course probes the decade's ferment, exploring the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious development of the United States from roughly 1960 to 1974. Placing the era in historical and global perspective, this course covers major events and trends including the New Frontier of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, the New Left, the counterculture, Richard Nixon and Watergate, and seeds of the New Right.
Consumerism in US
AMST 30387
T. Gloege
TR 12:30-1:45
Track 1 or 2
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.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY
Religion and Social Life
AMST 30507
K. Christiano
MW 1:30 – 2:45
Track 2
How does social life influence religion? How does religion influence society? What is religion's social significance in a complex society like ours? Is religion's significance declining? This course will consider these and other questions by exploring the great variety in social expressions of religion. The course examines the social bases of churches, sects, and cults, and it focuses on contemporary religion in the United States.
Materializations of America
AMST 40518
E. Halton
TR 3:30 - 4:45
Track 1
Industrialization in the twentieth-century resulted in a megatechnic America problematically related to materialism and to earlier visions of the New World. The course will consider a variety of materializations of America.
Native Peoples of America
AMST 30607
J. Mack
MWF 1:55 – 2:45
Track 2
This course offers a survey of the major groups with an emphasis on their forms of social organization, their political and economic patterns, their technological, religious, and artistic realms. Beginning with archaeological and linguistic evidence that traces the process by which the American Indians came to occupy the continent, the presentation of material will then follow the classical "culture area" paradigm. This overview recognizes a set of 11 basic divisions such as Eastern Woodlands, the Great Plains, and the Northwest Coast.
