This course introduces students to American studies by centralizing the history of slavery, colonialism, and imperial state practice in the formation and expansion of the United States. It traces not only the history and legacies of these practices, but also the myriad ways in which disparate Americans have negotiated and resisted state-sponsored racism and imperialism. The course is chronological in that it travels from Puritan New England to the "War on Terror," but it is conceptually nonlinear in that we will ask questions about rupture and continuity throughout each of these historical and contemporary moments.
Requirements
Precis (5): 15%
Participation: 15%
Comparative book review (1 course text and 2 outside texts): 25%
Final Paper Proposal and Bibliography: 10%
Final Paper: 35%
Possible Texts
Selections from:
Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right
Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq
Flag(s): Writing
