Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An examination of the role of racial thinking in the history of the Americas, from the era of the Conquest to the present day. Topics may include African and Indigenous slavery, the development of scientific racism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the persistence of racism in the present day. Students with credit for HIST 455 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Understanding race in the age of Trump

"Physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them." – American Anthropological Association, Statement on Race (1998)

Race, as we know it, is a historical construction that first emerged during the early modern era as Europeans were increasingly involved in trans-Atlantic ventures that depended on the exploitation of African and Indigenous peoples. As Europeans throughout the Americas hungered for Indigenous lands and African labor, they transformed their ethnocentric notions of cultural difference into ideas of immutable, inheritable, racial difference in ways that dramatically shaped the development of European colonies in the Americas and the nation states that would emerge from those colonies. This course will focus on one of those nation states, the United States, focusing on the establishment and long lasting legacies of racism, nativism, and white supremacy that continue to resound in the political, social, and cultural worlds of the present-day United States.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The assignments are geared towards helping you improve your skills in identifying and evaluating evidence and arguments in historical writing; interpreting primary documents; and writing argument-driven, evidence-based papers.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: