Admission requirements
None.
Description
This course examines some of the most important scholarly debates about American history, focusing on classic and recently-published works on such topics as the American Revolution, American liberalism, the South, immigration, the frontier, the Cold War, and the women’s movement. In addition to gaining an overview of American history, the course enables students to discuss important books in depth, and to examine the methodological and ideological approaches of leading historians.
Course objectives
Students will acquire knowledge and insight regarding:
The history and culture of the United States
Debates regarding key themes such as immigration, race, ethnicity, and foreign policy
The concept of “American exceptionalism,” especially as that idea reates to politics, economics, and foreign policy
Students will practice their ability to:
Summarize, analyze, and discuss key texts in American history and culture
Place those texts in their historical context and identify the political and ethical values that influenced them (relativism)
Relate historiographical and cultural debates to contemporary issues
Timetable
See timetable
Mode of instruction
Literature Seminar
Assessment method
8 book reviews of approx. 800 words each (80%)
oral presentation (20%)
Blackboard
Blackboard gives access to syllabus, biblioraphy, documentary sources, and additional texts
Reading list
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President (2005)
David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1958)
Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1940, 1991)
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (2003)
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1953)
Linda Gordon, The Moral Property: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (2007)
Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (2009)
Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009)
Registration
Via uSis