651 - 660 of 788 results for: HISTORY

Indigenous knowledges have been traditionally treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as mistaken epistemologies, i.e., un-scientific and irrational folklore. However, within the framework of environmental humanities, current interest in non-anthropocentric approaches and epistemic injustice, animism emerged as a critique of modern epistemology and an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge will be presented as a (potentially) decolonizing and liberating practice. This course may be of interest to anthropology, archaeology and literature students working in the fields of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities/social sciences, students interested in the Anthropocene, geologic/mineral, bio-, eco- and geosocial collectives, symbiotic life-forms and non-human agencies. The course is designed as a research seminar for students interested in theory of the humanities and social sciences and simultaneously helping students to develop their individual projects and thesis.

( 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.

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.

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.

The history of turbulent relations, military conflict, and cultural clashes between the U.S. and China, and the implications for the domestic lives of these increasingly interconnected countries. Diplomatic, political, social, cultural, and military themes from early contact to the recent past.

In the decades leading up to the American Civil War, the United States underwent profound transformations. Diverse developments - including the expansion of slavery and the increasing power of the cotton kingdom, the rise of the Second Great Awakening and mass politics, the growth of capitalism and its attendant panics, the construction of a series of reform movements, and deep uncertainties and anxieties about the proper role of women and people of color in the still new nation - made the lived experience of the period incredibly tumultuous. In this advanced undergraduate/graduate colloquium, students will explore the social, cultural, religious, political, economic, labor, and gender history and historiography of antebellum America, with a particular focus on how these developments were experienced by ordinary people.