Course Description
Social, intellectual, cultural, and political developments in United States history since 1900.
Athena Title
SEM RECENT US HIS
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course serves two overlapping purposes: first to explore with you various aspects of our topic as it is applies to recent U.S. history, past and present. We will do this through a variety of readings in the first half of the semester, each week focused on a select sampling of readings on a particular theme. Most readings are scholarly essays, by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, but they also include excerpts from autobiographies and memoirs, journalistic writings, short stories, and a play, genres not often encountered by graduate students in history. A comparison of different disciplines and genres will be a significant subtheme of the course. Because this a research and writing seminar, the second major goal of the course will be for each of you to produce a 20 to 25-page paper exploring through original research and fresh analysis a topic relating to recent U.S. history. Ideally, the finish product should be a publishable, or nearly publishable, article. Several of you already have topics in mind; others, no doubt, do not. Along with the readings, we will also spend the first part of the course finding or refining workable topics, and plan how they will be researched and written. Much of the latter half of the course will be spent producing these papers, and we will spend the last two weeks of the course critiquing the work toward a final publishable product by the term's end.
Topical Outline
Introduction to U.S. South: Talking Topics -Using Secondary Sources (Submit 1,000-word essay/review on The Slave Community, including discussion of its historical and historiographical context and the author’s use of sources.) Sept. -Using Primary Sources (Document exercise) -The Research Rationale 2nd course - The Multicultural South Introduction: What is Multiculturalism? -Native Americans and Mixed Race Identities -The South in Black and White– and In Between - Appalachia: The South’s South? - Judaism in the 20th Century South -The Traditional South as Foreign Export -Turn in Prospectus for Seminar Paper -Globalization and the Changing Face of the South