American Dreams and Realities

Catalog description

Interdisciplinary exploration of the dreams, myths, realities, and illusions of inclusion that have guided the American experience. Background and historical amnesia about indigenous displacements, settler colonialism, the after-lives of Atlantic world slavery, and the nation’s founding ideals, documents, and class-based distinctions; capitalism, war, empire, and the realities of immigrant America; historical exclusions and the struggle for racial, ethnic, and gender inclusions in the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the United States; capitalist competition, white privilege, the myths of meritocracy and the "self-made" American, and the realities of the working poor; psychological consequences of "failing" in American society; status consciousness/anxiety and the overworked, over-extended, and sleep-deprived American. Students will complete a semester-long, collaborative research project focused on the everyday lives of ordinary Americans via archives both digital and physical, field work involving sites of history making and memory, and/or the creation of oral history collections. This course is the same as American Studies 3108.