Core in American History, Part VI

Required of all first-year Ph.D. students in U.S. History. This course is designed to provide graduate students with an intensive introduction to twentieth-century U.S. social, political, transnational, and cultural history and historiography. We will read classic and canonical works as well as recent literature that has pushed the boundaries of the field. We will investigate a series of interrelated issues that have been central to twentieth-century historiography: nation-building; the changing organization of work and leisure; the rise of mass culture and mass consumption; changing and contested notions of American identity in the context of mass immigration and racial and gender conflict; and social movements and the politics of everyday life. We will pay close attention to the multiple meanings and significance of racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, religious, and nationalist identifications. History courses develop students' knowledge of how past events influence today's society,and help students to understand how humans view themselves. There are four main goals for this class: 1) students will acquire a perspective on history and an understanding of the factors that shape human life; 2) students will display knowledge about the origins and nature of contemporary issues and develop a foundation for comparative understanding; 3) students will think, speak, and write critically about primary and secondary historical sources by examining diverse interpretations of past events and ideas in their historical contexts; and 4) students will gain expertise in discussing historiography and will gain critical knowledge for teaching history courses and successfully passing oral examinations.