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Core in American History, Part II

Core in American History, Part III

May be repeated once for credit.

Required of all first-year United States History Ph.D. students. Topics in Twentieth Century United States History.

Required of all first-year Ph.D. students in U.S. History. This course is designed to provide graduate students with an intensive introduction to twentieth-century U.S. social, political, transnational, and cultural history and historiography. We will read classic and canonical works as well as recent literature that has pushed the boundaries of the field. We will investigate a series of interrelated issues that have been central to twentieth-century historiography: nation-building; the changing organization of work and leisure; the rise of mass culture and mass consumption; changing and contested notions of American identity in the context of mass immigration and racial and gender conflict; and social movements and the politics of everyday life. We will pay close attention to the multiple meanings and significance of racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, religious, and nationalist identifications. History courses develop students' knowledge of how past events influence today's society,and help students to understand how humans view themselves. There are four main goals for this class: 1) students will acquire a perspective on history and an understanding of the factors that shape human life; 2) students will display knowledge about the origins and nature of contemporary issues and develop a foundation for comparative understanding; 3) students will think, speak, and write critically about primary and secondary historical sources by examining diverse interpretations of past events and ideas in their historical contexts; and 4) students will gain expertise in discussing historiography and will gain critical knowledge for teaching history courses and successfully passing oral examinations.

How did the institution of American slavery come to an end? The story is more complex than most people know. This course examines the rival forces that fostered slavery's simultaneous contraction in the North and expansion in the South between 1776 and 1861. It also illuminates, in detail, the final tortuous path to abolition during the Civil War. Throughout, the course introduces a diverse collection of historical figures, including seemingly paradoxical ones, such as slaveholding southerners who professed opposition to slavery and non-slaveholding northerners who acted in ways that preserved it. During the course's final weeks, we will examine the racialized afterlives of American slavery as they manifested during the late-nineteenth century and beyond.

Except for the Bible no text has been the subject of as much modern interpretive scrutiny as the United States Constitution. This course explores both the historical dimensions of its creation as well as the meaning such knowledge should bring to bear on its subsequent interpretation. In light of the modern obsession with the document's "original meaning," this course will explore the intersections of history, law, and textual meaning to probe what an "original" interpretation of the Constitution looks like.

This graduate reading course will provide students with an intensive introduction to the history and historiography of slavery in colonial America and the United States with an eye toward placing the institution in a broader Atlantic context.

This colloquium takes as its starting point the insistence that the movement, settlement, and hierarchical arrangements of indigenous communities and people of African descent is inseparable from regimes of capital accumulation. It builds on the concept of "racial capitalism," which rejects treatments of race as external to a purely economic project and counters the idea that racism is an externality, cultural overflow, or aberration from the so-called real workings of capitalism. This course will cover topics such as chattel slavery, settler colonialism, black capitalism, the under-development of Africa, and the profitability of mass incarceration.