431 - 440 of 788 results for: HISTORY

The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 by the Supreme Court of the United States led to the consequent disenfranchisement of many voters of color. For many citizens who desire a truly representative government, SCOTUS's decision predicted the collapse of democracy and endorsed White supremacy. In this course, through an examination of jurisprudential racism and misogyny, students will learn to dissect the rhetoric of the U.S. judicial branch and the barriers it constructs to equity and inclusion through caselaw and appellate Opinions. The United States of America long deprived the right to vote to men of color and women of every race, and equal access to justice including at the intersections has been an enduring fight. The history of employment law, criminal justice, access to healthcare, and more includes jurisprudence enforcing racist and misogynist U.S. policies and social dynamics. Students will learn how to read a case, scrutinize court briefings, and contextualize bias as a foundation to erect a more just, equitable, and inclusionary legal system.

This course provides an introduction to the field of Asian American history. Tracing this history between the arrival of the first wave of Asian immigrants to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and the present, we foreground the voices and personal histories of seemingly everyday Asian Americans. In the process, the course disrupts totalizing national historical narratives that center the US nation-state and its political leaders as the primary agents of historical change.

Nothing better illustrates the evolution of the modern presidency than the arena of foreign policy. This class will examine the changing role and choices of successive presidential administrations over the past century, examining such factors as geopolitics, domestic politics, the bureaucracy, ideology, psychology, and culture. Students will be encouraged to think historically about the institution of the presidency, while examining specific case studies, from the First World War to the conflicts of the 21st century. Non-matriculating students are asked to consult the instructor before enrolling in the course.

As weapons, the pen and the sword have been used to wound, punish, and condemn as well as to protect, liberate, and elevate. Historically entangled with ideals of heroism, nobility, and civility, the pen and the sword have been the privileged instruments of men. Yet, throughout history, women have picked up the pen and the sword in defense, despair, and outrage as well as with passion, vision, and inspiration. This course is dedicated to them, and to study of works on love, sex, and power that articulate female experience. In our readings and seminars, we will encounter real and fictive women in their own words and in narrations and depictions by others from classical antiquity to the present, with a special focus on the Renaissance and on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Touching on such topics as flattery and slander through the study of misogynistic, protofeminist, and feminist works in the early modern and modern periods in various European literary traditions, we will consider questions of truth and falsehood in fiction and in life. Course materials span a variety genres and media, from poetry, letters, dialogues, public lectures, treatises, short stories, and drama to painting, sculpture, music, and film works regarded for their aesthetic, intellectual, religious, social, and political value and impact.

Popular references to the 1990s are often contradictory: it was somehow an era of prosperity and anxiety, stability and scandal, "colorblindness" and "race riots," and "New Democrats" and the "Republican Revolution." This course seeks to reconcile these apparent inconsistencies by examining the intersections of gender and race in American politics and popular culture. With a historical framework, students will situate this decade within the larger shifts of the late twentieth-century, including political realignment, increasing polarization, and economic dislocation.

Whether you identify as a Swiftie or "grumble on about how she can't sing," it is impossible to deny that Taylor Swift has become a cultural, economic, and political powerhouse. This course will place Swift in historical context within the modern United States, exploring the forces that enabled her rise to superstardom as well as those that shape her loyal millennial and Gen-Z fanbase. Topics include the politics of country music; the roles of globalization and technology in the rapidly changing music industry; feminist readings, and feminist critiques, of Swift's career; and the attempts of various communities to claim Swift as their own, including Gaylors and the alt-right. Fans and non-fans alike are welcome, as our historical objective is to explore Swift, the world that made her, and the world that she is creating at a critical distance.

This class will explore the long, tangled history of women's labor in North America. Beginning with gendered labor practices among Native Americans, West Africans, and Europeans in the seventeenth century, this class will proceed thematically and chronologically through the early twentieth century. We will consider the deep roots of gendered labor in American history, asking how categories of race and class, freedom and enslavement, and immigration status have structured female labor. We will also examine the ways in which social transformations such as industrialization and urbanization, as well as changes in the economic, political, and sexual order shaped the experiences of laboring women. Reading secondary sources alongside a rich array of primary sources, including images and songs, we will consider the deep continuities and wrenching changes in the meanings of women's work over time.

(262E is 5 units; 62E is 3 units.)This course is a historical analysis of extremism in the United States from Reconstruction through the present day, looking at such figures and movements and the KKK, the First Red Scare, Father Coughlin and the Christian Front, McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, the Aryan Nations, and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers of the present. Students will explore the following questions: what do we mean by extremism? What are the material, cultural, political, and intellectual conditions that lay the groundwork for extremism? What is the relationship between political and religious extremism? Is there a connecting thread spanning extremist movements across the nation's history--a paranoid style or authoritarian personality, perhaps? With these guiding questions, students will be introduced to primary sources along with scholarly literature--classic texts and new, groundbreaking research--to equip them with a foundational knowledge of the long history of extremism in the United States.

This course examines the ongoing importance of sex, including sexual behavior and sexuality, in American culture and politics. We will use sex as a lens through which we can interpret major events and themes in United States history, and in the process we will uncover otherwise hidden beliefs and anxieties. From Puritans to the present day, we will analyze primary sources including court cases, letters, diaries, and memoirs alongside theoretical and historical scholarship.