Teaching

HIST 201: Colonial America to Civil War Era

This course is an overview of American History from pre-colonial times to 1815. Main topics include: Ancient America, Europeans and the New World, the Northern and Southern colonies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Revolutionary War, Building the New Nation, Early American Politics, the Slave South, Nationalism, the Jacksonian Era, the Slave South, Religion & Reform, Western Expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

HIST 202: United States History, Civil War Era to Present

This course is an overview of United States History from 1815 to 1920. Main topics include: the Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, and World War I, The Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Social Movements of the 1960s and 70s, the End of the Cold War, and the Early 21st Century.

HIST 323: African American History to 1876

Since the early days of slavery, people of African descent in America have played important roles in shaping American history, politics, and culture. By locating blacks in American at the center of American history, this course seeks to expand students’ notion of American history as well as raise new questions about today. This course will equip students with tools of the discipline, laying groundwork for a wider understanding of African American history

HIST 324: African American History, 1876-present

Though hundreds of years of exploitation, disenfranchisement, racism, sexism, and classism make up African American history, these stories of declension do not define African American History. Instead, in every decade, we find stories of hope, agency, resistance, and an undying quest for racial equality. This course provides a narrative arc to these stories, illuminating the connections, as well as divisions, in the long history of African Americans.

HIST 326: The Long Civil Rights Movement

This class encourages you to look beyond the traditional idea of the Civil Rights Movement to explore issues of the working class, gender, sexuality, personal politics, sexual violence, region, and more. In doing so, we will examine how looking at the Civil Rights Movement as “Long” challenges not only our conception of America’s racial history, but our notions of race, class, and gender today.

HIST 358: United States Pop Culture, 1876-present

This course will explore popular cultural content produced by Americans of African descent. We will question what “culture” and how we often take for granted the various ways in which Black Americans have contributed to what we think of as American pop culture. We will focus on three specific genres of African American culture: music, athletics, and literature.

HIST 625: Women’s History

Through oral histories, family traditions and lore, illustrations, census records, organizational records, and more, historians since the 1980s have re-written the history of Black women in the United States, and therefore, the history of the country. As we continue to read their work, we must challenge ourselves to confront the stereotypes, tropes, sexist, and racist notions of Black women- and all women of color- that have for so long pervaded American history.

HIST 733: Seminar in
American Industrialism and Reform, 1887-1914

This time period goes by many terms- the Industrial Era, the Gilded Age, Post-Reconstruction- but we will discover it truly defies one specific definition. It was an era of contradictions: Americans moved west, but cities grew more crowded; men became millionaires while their workers suffered; Jim Crow laws severely stunted African Americans’ opportunities, yet some remarkable individuals arise; women were limited by traditional gender roles, yet led successful reform movements. This course works through these tensions and helps set the foundation for the 20th century.

HIST 540: United States in the 20th Century

This course deals with urban segregation during the 20th century. We will work our way through the decades, seeing how racial segregation has shifted, adapted, waxed, and waned due to private, individual, and government forces. While many of the histories we will study center around violence, death, poverty, and suffering of African American people, this course is not a declension story. Instead, in every decade, we see Black activists, scholars, law-makers, jurists, and journalists fighting for racial justice reflected in the places they lived..