421 - 430 of 788 results for: HISTORY

How education came to its current forms and functions, from the colonial experience to the present. Focus is on the 19th-century invention of the common school system, 20th-century emergence of progressive education reform, and the developments since WW II. The role of gender and race, the development of the high school and university, and school organization, curriculum, and teaching.

The term "identity politics" has become a staple of contemporary popular discourse, one typically associated with political mobilization around issues concerning one's selfhood. Yet, although the term has traditionally been directed at the activities of women, racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ communities, the phenomenon extends well beyond recent times. This course explores how national, racial, ethnic, gender, and class identities have evolved in response to moments of significant social, political, and economic upheaval in modern American history. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, we will engage a range of historical studies that demonstrate how identity is politics, as well as how conflicts involving identity often reflect broader problems defining American life.

In the 1870s, liberalism in America was associated with freedom of contract, small government, and, quite often, restrictions on suffrage. Today, liberalism means nearly the opposite of that. This class examines how factors like war, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, disease, fascism, and economic instability have reshaped liberalism. American liberalism has been labelled protean, flexible, or just imprecise. The goal of this course is to identify some of the strands that hold it together by contextualizing its evolution within social changes that have forced liberals to reevaluate their ideas.

How do societies balance liberty and stability, popular rule and effective authority? Why do some republics endure while others collapse into oligarchy, tyranny, or empire? Is a well-designed constitution sufficient to sustain democratic self-government over time? These questions are as urgent today as they were in antiquity. At a moment when democratic institutions face mounting pressure, this course examines the long history of constitutional thought and practice in order to better understand the promises and limits of constitutional democracy. The course traces the development of constitutionalism from Ancient Greece and Rome through medieval, early modern, and modern political thought, culminating in contemporary debates over executive power, judicial review, populism, and democratic self-defense. Students will study classical accounts of democracy and its failures; theories of sovereignty, representation, and the separation of powers; and the constitutional experiments. By placing canonical texts in dialogue with historical case studies, students will gain a deeper understanding of constitutional design, democratic stability, and the enduring tension between popular rule and the rule of law.

This course explores the unique role the law has played in Asian American racialization and identity formation while also introducing students to the fundamentals of legal analysis and research. Students will learn how to read legal documents such as case law, legislation, legal reviews, and executive orders alongside other primary sources such as newspaper reporting, oral histories, and cultural texts. In using the law to frame an analysis of Asian Americanness, students will put both the law and race under a critical lens and explore how the historical constructions of both have shaped the Asian American experience.

This course examines the origins, conduct, and complex legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the continuing struggle over how the movement should be remembered and represented. Topics examined include: the NAACP legal campaign against segregation; the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.; the birth of the student movement; the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project; the rise of Black Power; Black political movements in the urban North; and the persistence of racial inequality in post-Jim Crow America.

This class seeks to examine the modern American experience with limited wars, beginning with distant and yet pertinent cases, and culminating in the war in Iraq. Although this class will examine war as a consequence of foreign policy, it will not focus primarily on presidential decision making. Rather, it will place wartime policy in a broader frame, considering it alongside popular and media perceptions of the war, the efforts of antiwar movements, civil-military relations, civil reconstruction efforts, and conditions on the battlefield. We will also examine, when possible, the postwar experience. Non-matriculating students are asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.

This course explores how Black women have experienced, remembered, and recovered from trauma. Drawing on historical texts, works in psychology, legal records, medical literature, diaries, novels, poetry, plays, songs, and films, we will consider how Black women recorded, passed down, and inherited stories about traumatic events. We begin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Black women's experiences on slave ships and during slavery, we discuss intergenerational trauma, and we conclude by examining the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black women's lives. We pay considerable attention to how Black women relied on the arts to speak the unspeakable. The class will centrally address healing, recovery, and resistance. We will read texts by writers, activists, legal scholars, and artists including Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, bell hooks, Saidiya Hartman, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Jesmyn Ward.

"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks." In her first argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, the future justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered this memorable quote from nineteenth-century activist, Sarah Grimke. The quote captured the long arc of the struggle against sex discrimination and the debate over whether women needed special favor or untrammeled freedom to achieve equality. Putting Ginsburg's comments in context, this course examines the history of gender and the U.S. Constitution from the Reconstruction era to the present. We will examine the evolving meaning of discrimination "on the basis of sex" and the constitutional revisions and reinterpretations required to combat it. We will focus on developments under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process and equal protection clauses, but we will also discuss the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment and the decades-long battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. At every step, we will consider how gender and racial equality are intertwined, and we will examine the ways in which feminists' legal strategies succeeded and failed in drawing analogies between race and sex and in centering the voices of women of color. Additionally, we will discuss the stakes of these constitutional debates in shaping the future of reproductive rights and transgender rights. Readings will include landmark legal decisions, historical documents, and secondary sources.