401 - 410 of 788 results for: HISTORY

( History 254E is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 354E is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Where did American democracy come from? Prior to and during the American Revolution, few who lived in what became the United States claimed to live in a democracy. Half a century later, most took this reality as an article of faith. Accordingly, the period stretching from c. 1750 to c. 1840 is often considered the period when American democracy was ascendant, a time marked by the explosion of new forms of political thinking, practices, and culture, new political institutions and forms of political organization, and new kinds of political struggles. This advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium will explore how American political life changed during this formative period to understand the character of early American democracy, how different groups gained or suffered as a result of these transformations, and, in light of these investigations, in what ways it is historically appropriate to think of this period as in fact the rise of American democracy.

This course places the recent wave of hate violence directed against Asian Americans in historical context. The recent violence is the latest in a history that began with the arrival of Asian immigrants in America in the mid-19th century and continued into the 21st century. Themes include anti-Asian racism; fears of a 'yellow peril' and race war; identifying Asians as perpetual foreigners and suspect aliens; race and wars in Asia and the consequences at home; fears of medical contamination; and gendered violence against Asian women. Asian American responses to hatred are integrated throughout the course.

The role of the news media in a democracy has been a source of controversy throughout American history. This colloquium will examine how technology, capitalism, law, and politics have reshaped the press over time and how the press, in turn, has impacted democratic discourse and formed partisan, gender, and ethnic identities. Students will be expected to write a primary source paper using historical newspapers to engage with debates about the history of news media.

The institution of slavery was made by law. It legitimated and facilitated enslavement, regulated the lives of the enslaved and their relationships with others, and determined how, if at all, enslaved people might become free. But the law was also made by slavery. Indeed, many features of our contemporary legal system - its structure, its rules, its concepts - grew out of the efforts of judges, legislators, and ordinary people to either defend or destroy the institution. This advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium explores the interconnection of slavery and the law in a specifically American context, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the colonial era through the demise of slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition to working with secondary sources by historians and legal scholars, we will also spend considerable time with a wide variety of primary sources - legal texts that include treatises, statutes, local case files, and appellate decisions.

This course incorporates a Native American perspective in the assigned readings and is an introduction to Native American History from contact with Europeans to the present. History, from a Western perspective, is secular and objectively evaluative whereas for most Indigenous peoples, history is a moral endeavor (Walker, Lakota Society 113). A focus in the course is the civil rights era in American history when Native American protest movements were active. Colonization and decolonization, as they historically occurred are an emphasis throughout the course using texts written from the perspective of the colonized at the end of the 20th century in addition to the main text. Students will be encouraged to critically explore issues of interest through two short papers and one longer paper that is summarized in a 15-20 minute presentation on a topic of interest relating to the course.

This course examines masculinity in the twentieth-century United States across academic disciplines. Suspending the idea that manhood is biologically fixed or innate, this course presents masculinity as socially constructed and in a state of ongoing contest and crisis. Students will explore what it has meant (and means) to be a man in America, how masculinity has related to femininity and feminism, and masculinity's intersection with other identities like race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. Assigned materials include an array of readings in History, African and African American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, Art History, and American Studies, along with documentary and fictional films.

From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.

(Undergraduates, enroll in 255F; Graduates, enroll in 355F.) This course examines the critical period between 1860, when the first states seceded in defense of enslavement, and 1896, when the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision affirmed the constitutionality of Jim Crow. We will focus, at first, on the crucial role played by African Americans, enslaved and free, in the abolition of slavery and in the fundamental reframing of civil rights effected by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We will then shift to a close study of the decades-long fight between those who sought to defend these advances in racial justice and those who sought to constrain them, even invalidate them. Students will engage with primary source material in every class session and will write final papers on topics of their own choosing.

In 2021 Governor Galvin Newsom singed a law ending single-family zoning in the state of California, a remarkable departure for the state of California, which had pioneered automobile-centric suburban development. This course aims to contextualize contemporary concerns about the suburb. Life outside of the urban core had often been seen as dangerous and uncivilized. But, by the middle of the 20th century, homogenous, middle class suburban households were often depicted as quintessentially American bulwarks against communism. This course will engage with debates over whether that transformation was a natural result of technological innovation or a contingent product of public policy and white flight. It will then consider how suburban planning has impacted popular culture, ecology, race, politics, national identity, and even foreign policy.