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How do images tell stories about the people who made them and the places they depict? How can we encounter the histories of America in works of art and why should we care about encountering them? This course will explore such questions by surveying some of the most compelling paintings, sculptures, films, photographs, prints, and decorative arts produced in the United States from the Colonial period to our present moment. In class lectures and discussions, our goal will be to articulate how pictures from the past shape and construct our sense of American history. Works by important artists such as Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jacob Lawrence, among others, will help students to understand and express how Images have power, and how art continues to matter today.

In this seminar you will explore theory and practice, sociological data, spiritual writing, and case studies in an effort to gain a more nuanced understanding about how religion, spirituality, and secularism attempt to make legible the constellation of concerns, commitments, and behaviors that bridge the moral and the personal, the communal and the national, the sacred, the profane, and the rational. Together we will cultivate critical perspectives on practices and politics, beliefs and belonging that we typically take for granted.

This course uses readings from sociology, political science, and legal/ethical reasoning to elucidate the larger structures and ideals that are at stake in the debates over what kind of speech is tolerable ¿ or normatively speaking, desirable ¿ at colleges and universities. Students will achieve a greater understanding of: free speech¿s role in American society and democracy, how America¿s position on free speech compares to other countries, and how speech restriction and liberties can reveal larger patterns in structure and agency

The Wild West: a mythical place seared deep into the American imagination. Its familiar tropes lone riders on horseback, desert sunsets, saloon fights, train robberies echo through countless Western stories, novels, films, radio programs, and television series. Both formulaic and flexible, the Western has endured as a popular genre in American culture for more than a century, embodying and responding to many of the nation's broader anxieties surrounding its colonial history, its notions of masculinity and gender roles, its fascination with guns and violence, and its ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In this class we'll examine the Western genre through a selection of its central works in fiction and film, from the first dime novel Western, Ann S. Stephens Malaeska (1860), to Cormac McCarthy¿s acclaimed Blood Meridian (1985); and from the first silent film Western, Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), to the mid-century Hollywood films of John Ford, to Maggie Greenwald¿s feminist Western, The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). Along the way we'll examine the Western as both a literary form and a cultural phenomenon, probing the history of its enduring appeal as a genre. How do these novels and films construct, adapt, and subvert the form and expectations of the Western, and how do they both perpetuate and challenge the broader cultural problems of their, and our, time? Finally, as Californians and inheritors of the nation's westward expansion, what does the Western tell us about national myths of the West, and the place in which we live?

Restricted to declared majors. Practical experience working in a field related to American Studies for six to ten weeks. Students make internship arrangements with a company or agency, under the guidance of a sponsoring faculty member, and with the consent of the director or a program coordinator of American Studies. Required paper focused on a topic related to the internship and the student's studies. May be repeated for credit.