Admission requirements
Bachelor’s degree.
This course is part of the MA North American Studies, but students from other MA programs are welcome too if there are places available. Please enquire with the study adviser for the options.
Description
This interdisciplinary course, which is a required course for all students in MA North American Studies, offers an introduction to major issues in, and influential scholarly debates about, American history, culture, and society. Students will discuss a number of topics that are crucial to understanding the contemporary United States such as freedom, empire, equality, (neo)liberalism, security, human rights, environmentalism, visual and digital cultures, and youth politics. Taken together, these varied themes will provide students with a multifaceted perspective into the historical rise, consolidation, and crisis of American exceptionalism. At the same time, the course will expose students to the most important methodological, theoretical, and ideological approaches that have enriched the American Studies field in the last decades, including the cultural, transnational, and intersectional turns as well as the ongoing interdisciplinary cross-fertilization with digital and environmental humanities. The course, which will also make extensive use of the Leiden University MOOC “The Rooseveltian Century,” will introduce and contextualize a number of subjects that will be discussed in more detail and depth in the elective courses of the MA program.
Course objectives
This course aims to:
Make students familiar with a number of major issues and key concepts in American history and culture, for example, freedom, security, empire, U.S. exceptionalism, migration, race, and gender, and the scholarly debates about these issues (skills: analyzing, reflecting);
Stimulate students to think critically about major historical issues and link them to contemporary developments in American society, culture, and politics (skills: analyzing; societal awareness, reflecting);
Teach students to recognize different theoretical, methodological, and ideological approaches to the study of American history as well as North American Studies as an interdisciplinary field (skills: analyzing, reflecting);
Develop students’ skills to conduct independent research and to formulate clear research questions and a viable thesis statement, and situate their own research in an academic debate (skills: research, analyzing; generating solutions, reflecting, independent learning, resilience);
Develop students’ oral communication skills through in-class discussions and group presentations (skills: working together; oral communication, presenting, reflecting);
Develop students analytical, critical, and writing skills by writing critical reviews, and a historiographical essay (skills: research, analyzing, reflecting, independent learning, resilience
Develop students’ ability to provide constructive feedback to and formulate criticism of the work of other students and the ability to evaluate the value of such criticism and feedback on one’s own work and incorporate it (skills: analyzing, working together, oral communication, presenting, reflecting).
Timetable
The timetables are available through My Timetable.
Mode of instruction
- Seminar
Assessment method
Assessment
Oral presentation (15%)
Participation in class discussions (15%)
Book reviews (20%)
Historiographical essay (50%)
Weighing
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average. To pass the course, the weighted average of the partial grades must be 5.5 or higher.
Resit
If the essay receives an insufficient grade, it may be rewritten.
Inspection and feedback
How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organized.
Reading list
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
- T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
- Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021).
- Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022).
- Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
- Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of the U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
- Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).
- Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
- Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2016).
- Susan Colbourn, Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons that Nearly Destroyed NATO (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
- Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (New York: Basic Books, 2022).
Required readings are subject to change. Additional literature will be indicated on the course syllabus and made available through Brightspace and/or a course shelf in the University Library.
Registration
Enrolment through My Studymap is mandatory.
General information about uSis is available on the website
Contact
For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.
For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Arsenaal.
Remarks
All other information.