The American Citizen

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary, intertextual course draws on a wide variety of foundational documents and cultural artifacts to tell the story of American ideas, spaces, histories, and peoples. While special attention will be paid to the early sources of the American experiment, we will also engage those legacies as they are narrated and contested in contemporary America. For example, in Frederick Douglass's speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" we will find traces of the Black Lives Matter movement. We will place The Constitution in conversation with Ava DuVernay's documentary "13th," and we will test the claims of the Declaration of Independence against Elizabeth Cady Stanton's paraphrase in the Declaration of Sentiments. Beyond a careful reading of the foundational documents of the United States, we will more broadly consider what we mean by the term "American." The course will consider the histories of Native peoples, and how their history has been erased, marginalized, or mythologized in the wider culture. We'll also explore the natural environment and the ways it's been treated in American politics and philosophy, and we'll look at the ways in which various human structures-from railroads to bridges to cities-have intruded on those spaces. Finally, in each of the units of this course, we'll draw on the work of artists in a number of different genres and mediums as they attempt to tell the American story.