AMSTUD 44Q: Self-Made: Culture, Identity, and Histories of Reinvention in America
From Ben Franklin to Oprah, Americans have triumphantly reinvented their identities, and used these transformations to demonstrate their ingenuity and grit. But the history of personal reinvention in America is far more complicated. In this course we will study the lives of individuals who adopted new identities in response to restrictive political and social conditions. How did these people construct their new identities, and what cultural influences did they use to do so? What did they gain in the process of assuming new identities, and what did they lose?nnCase studies from the 19th and 20th centuries include Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple who escaped bondage by pretending that Ellen was already free, and a young African-American musician named John Roland Redd, who found fame as the turban-wearing television host ¿Korla Pandit.¿ Crossing seemingly fixed cultural divisions (race, gender, sexuality, citizenship), these individuals raise compelling questions about the larger political stakes of self-reinvention. How did acts of self-reinvention challenge inequality and oppression? What kinds of systems could not be dismantled through self-reinvention?
Last offered: Spring 2020
AMSTUD 46N: American Moderns: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, & Fitzgerald (ENGLISH 46N)
While Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. We will read four short novels - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - to address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished."
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
AMSTUD 51Q: Comparative Fictions of Ethnicity (COMPLIT 51Q, CSRE 51Q)
Explorations of how literature can represent in complex and compelling ways issues of difference--how they appear, are debated, or silenced. Specific attention on learning how to read critically in ways that lead one to appreciate the power of literary texts, and learning to formulate your ideas into arguments. Course is a Sophomore Seminar and satisfies Write2. By application only
Terms: Spr
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: Writing 2, WAY-A-II, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Palumbo-Liu, D. (PI)
AMSTUD 54: The History of Ideas in America, Part I (to 1900) (HISTORY 54)
(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.
Last offered: Autumn 2022
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
AMSTUD 54B: The History of Ideas in America, Part II (AMSTUD 154B, HISTORY 54B, HISTORY 154B)
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.
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
AMSTUD 54N: African American Women's Lives (HISTORY 54N)
This course encourages students to think critically about historical sources and to use creative and rigorous historical methods to recover African American women's experiences, which often have been placed on the periphery of American history and American life.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, GER:EC-Gender, GER:DB-Hum, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Hobbs, A. (PI)
AMSTUD 55F: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1830 to 1877 (AFRICAAM 55F, AMSTUD 155F, HISTORY 55F, HISTORY 155F)
(
History 55F is 3 units;
History 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.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
AMSTUD 57S: "Don't Tread on Me!": The Spirit of 1776 in U.S. Politics & Culture, From the Constitution to Jan 6 (HISTORY 57S)
Are the people responsible for the American Revolution demigods or devils? What did they really believe, and what would they think of the United States today? The answers to these questions have been fraught - yet important - since the Revolution. This course explores the many ways in which the memory of the Revolution has been interpreted, appropriated, and remixed. We will explore the politics of memory, interrogate America's relationship to its founding, and study rhetoric from across the political spectrum - from abolitionists to fascists to Hamilton and beyond.
Terms: Win
| Units: 5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
Instructors:
Depew, J. (PI)
AMSTUD 61N: The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson (HISTORY 61N)
Thomas Jefferson assumed many roles during his life-- Founding Father, revolutionary, and author of the Declaration of Independence; natural scientist, inventor, and political theorist; slaveholder, founder of a major political party, and President of the United States. This introductory seminar explores these many worlds of Jefferson, both to understand the multifaceted character of the man and the broader historical contexts that he inhabited and did so much to shape.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI
AMSTUD 63N: The Feminist Critique: The History and Politics of Gender Equality (CSRE 63N, FEMGEN 63N, HISTORY 63N)
This course explores the long history of ideas about gender and equality. Each week we read, dissect, compare, and critique a set of primary historical documents (political and literary) from around the world, moving from the 15th century to the present. We tease out changing arguments about education, the body, sexuality, violence, labor, politics, and the very meaning of gender, and we place feminist critics within national and global political contexts.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
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