American Social and Cultural History

Catalog description

Surveying Social and Cultural History in the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, this course examines key themes and topics in the history of the field, including: race, class, gender, sexuality, labor, migration, citizenship, incarceration, and environment. This seminar gives students an overview of major questions and problems in American Social and Cultural History such as What is culture? How does society produce culture? What is the relationship between culture and politics? How do we write history from the bottom up? How do our methods constrain what histories we can tell? Methodologically, this course exposes students to a range of theories and subfields including political history, gender history, history of capitalism, labor history, urban history, and legal history. Additionally this seminar examines journalistic historical writing, biographies, and opinion editorials in order to examine the multiple forms history writing can take.