91 - 100 of 789 results for: HISTORY

This January, an armed insurrection assaulted the U.S. Capital, trying to block the Electoral College affirmation of President Biden's election. For the past four years, American democracy has been in continual crisis. Bitter and differing views of what constitutes truth have resulted in a deeply polarized electoral process. The sharp increase in partisanship has crippled our ability as a nation to address and resolve the complex issues facing us. <br><br>There are reasons to hope the current challenges will be overcome and the path of our democracy will be reset on a sound basis. But that will require a shift to constructive--rather than destructive--political conflict. <br><br>This Sophomore Seminar will focus on U.S. democracy and will use a series of case studies of major events in our national history to explore what happened and why to American democracy at key pressure points. This historical exploration will shed light on how the current challenges facing American democracy might best be handled. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center).

For over a century African-Americans have shaped the contours of San Francisco, a globally recognized metropolis, but their histories remain hidden. While endangered, Black San Francisco is still very much alive, and its history is an inextricable piece of the city's social and cultural fabric. This course aims to uncover the often-overlooked history of African-Americans in the city of San Francisco. The history of Black San Francisco unravels the myth of San Francisco liberalism showing how systemic racial oppression greatly limited the social mobility of non-whites well into the 20th century. Conversely, this course will also highlight the rich cultural and artistic legacies of Black San Franciscans with special attention on their ability to create social. Starting with the small, but influential middle and upper classes of African-Americans, who supported abolitionism from the West in the mid-late nineteenth century, to the rapid growth of the black population during WWII and moving through post-war struggles against the forces of Jim Crow and environmental racism. This course will explore: What is Black San Francisco? How did African-Americans shape the culture and politics of San Francisco, and where does the history of Black San Francisco fit into the broader national historical narrative? Conversely, what is unique about San Francisco and similar black communities in the West? How do we reconstruct the past of people going South to West as opposed to South to North? And finally, as raised in the critically acclaimed 2019 film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and eluded by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, where does black San Franciscans, go from here?

(Same as HISTORY 154. 54 is 3 units; 154 is 5 units.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.

This course explores intellectual life and culture in the United States during the twentieth century, examining the work and lives of social critics, essayists, artists, scientists, journalists, novelists, and sundry other thinkers. We will look at the life of the mind as a narrative of ongoing yet contested secularization and a series of debates about the meaning and nature of truth, knowing, selfhood, and the American democratic experience. Persistent themes include modernism and anti-modernism, shifts and changes in political liberalism and conservatism, disagreements about the role of the United States in the world, and the importance of distinctions based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender.

This course encourages students to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover Black women's lives from the nineteenth century to the present.

The future of America's memorial landscape is a subject of intense debate. How do societies remember? Who built the nation's monuments and memorials, and to what ends? Can the meaning of a memorial change over time? In this course, we will survey the history of memorialization in the United States, paying close attention to the interplay of race, gender, and nationalism. Case studies include: the political uses of textbooks and memoirs; Civil War memory and the Lost Cause; the re-interpretation of slavery at historic sites; and the renaming movement on Stanford's campus.

( CSRE 55F is 3 units; CSRE 155F is 5 units.)This course explores the causes, course, and consequences of the American Civil War. The Civil War profoundly impacted American life at national, sectional, and constitutional levels, and radically challenged categories of race and citizenship. Topics covered include: the crisis of union and disunion in an expanding republic; slavery, race, and emancipation as national problems and personal experiences; the horrors of total war for individuals and society; and the challenges--social and political--of Reconstruction.

What is the history of debt in America? How has indebtedness become an inescapable condition for some, and a virtue for others? What can we learn from the forgotten efforts of those who issued debt, lived in debt, struggled through debt, and mobilized in and around debt? This survey course examines the links between debt, power, development, and mobility. Together, we will see how debt transformed daily life in North America over the past 500 years, and spot moments when collective action undermined the supposed unbreakable terms of indebtedness. This class neither presumes a background in economics, nor previous coursework in history.

The United States Constitution has been the nation's fundamental law since it was adopted over two centuries ago. Along the way, it has provided the basic framework through which Americans have governed themselves and secured their fundamental liberty. It has also been an endless site of struggle as Americans, in debating the reach of national power, slavery, democracy, equality, personal autonomy, and much else, have vigorously disputed not simply what the Constitution means and licenses but more fundamentally what it even is. This course offers a broad overview of this expansive history from its eighteenth-century origins to our modern era. It focuses on pivotal developments and debates that have shaped the constitutional order and the various institutions and actors who have played an important role in that process, not simply the Supreme Court and the cases it has decided, but also the other branches of government, the political process, and the social movements that have mobilized new understandings of the Constitution to advance their goals. It emphasizes contest and change through law, politics, and culture, exploring how the Constitution has been at once a political and legal document as well a source of national identity that binds generations to one another.