Courses Related to American Culture
Courses Related to American Culture
This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenth and nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first half of the class, we will consider abolition in England and its colonies, Haiti,Cuba, and the U.S. In so doing we will examine both primary sources from abolitionist print culture (narratives by fugitives from slavery, speeches, poems, and polemical tracts), as well as secondary sources by historians, literary critics, and political theorists. In the second half, we will likewise read writing by activists (some incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and some not) alongside journalism and scholarship from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral studies. Across both periods, Black writers will take up the bulk of our attention.
This Course is intended to look at key developments of American History through the prism of Supreme Court decisions and their aftermath. In essence, this Course will address three questions: 1. How did the Supreme Court reflect, and affect, historic patterns of U.S. development, and how did it impact the legal and economic framework of the United States? 2. How did the Supreme Court respond to, or worsen, crises in U.S. history? 3. How did the perception of individual and collective rights and liberties, and of the function and role of Governments -- both Federal and State -- evolve over time?
“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives.
This course examines the pattern of political development in urban America, as the country's population has grown in urbanized locations. It explores the process by which cities and suburbs are governed, how immigrants and migrants are incorporated, and how people of different races and ethnicities interact in urbanized settings as well as the institutional relations of cities and suburbs with other jurisdictions of government. The course focuses both on the historical as well the theoretical understandings of politics in urban areas.
This course will examine how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Focus will be on the role that race, citizenship, capitalism/labor, property, and ownership played in the court decision in the context of the historical, social, and political conditions existing at the time. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government sanctioned segregation, the struggle for reparations for descendants of slavery, and Japanese Americans during World War II.
The aim of this course is to read closely and slowly short prose masterworks written in the United States between the mid-19th century and the mid-20th century, and to consider them in disciplined discussion. Most of the assigned works are fiction, but some are public addresses or lyrical or polemical essays. We will read with attention to questions of audience and purpose: for whom were they written and with what aim in mind: to promote a cause, make a case for personal or political action, provoke pleasure, or some combination of all of these aims? We will consider the lives and times of the authors but will focus chiefly on the aesthetic and argumentative structure of the works themselves.
A survey of the history of the American South from the colonial era to the present day, with two purposes: first, to afford students an understanding of the special historical characteristics of the South and of southerners; and second, to explore what the experience of the South may teach about America as a nation.
This course explores how American women writers who suffered from depression, disability, bodily pain, or social marginalization, used the environment and its literary representations to redefine the categories of gender, ability, and personhood. Prior to their inclusion into the public sphere through the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment which in 1920 granted women the right to vote, American artists had to be particularly resourceful in devising apt strategies to counter the political and aesthetic demands that had historically dispossessed them of the voice, power, and body. This course focuses on the women writers who conceptualized their own surroundings (home, house, marriage, country, land, island and the natural world) as an agent that actively and decisively participates in the construction and dissolution of personal identity. In doing so, they attempted to annul the separation of the public (politics) and the private (home) as respective male and female spheres, and in this way they contributed, ahead of their own time, to the suffragist debates. Our task in this course will be to go beyond the traditional critical dismissal of these emancipatory strategies as eccentric or “merely aesthetic” and therefore inconsequential. Instead, we will take seriously Rowlandson’s frontier diet, Fuller’s peculiar cure for her migraines, Wheatley’s oblique references to the Middle Passage, Jewett’s islands, Ša’s time-travel, Thaxter’s oceans, Hurston’s hurricanes, and Sansay’s scathing portrayal of political revolutions. We will read these portrayals as aesthetic decisions that had—and continue to have—profound political consequences: by externalizing and depersonalizing what is commonly understood to be internal and intimate, the authors we read collapse the distinction between inside and outside, between the private and public—the distinction that traditionally excluded women from participation in the public life, in policy- and decision-making.
A remarkable array of Southern historians, novelists, and essayists have done what Shreve McCannon urges Quentin Compson to do in William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!--tell about the South--producing recognized masterpieces of American literature. Taking as examples certain writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, this course explores the issues they confronted, the relationship between time during which and about they wrote, and the art of the written word as exemplified in their work. Group(s): D Field(s): US Limited enrollment. Priority given to senior history majors. After obtaining permission from the professor, please add yourself to the course wait list so the department can register you in the course.
Few events in American history can match the significance of the American Civil War and Reconstruction and few left a better cache of records for scholars seeking to understand its signal events, actors, and processes. Starting with the secession of eleven southern states, white southerners’ attempts to establish a proslavery republic (the Confederate States of America) unleashed an increasingly radical, even revolutionary war. Indeed, as the war assumed a massive scope it drove a process of state building and state-sponsored slave emancipation in the United States that ultimately reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it.