Search Results
Your search for courses · tagged with HIST US History · returned 32 results
-
AMST 115 Introduction to American Studies 6 credits
This overview of the “interdisciplinary discipline” of American Studies will focus on the ways American Studies engages with and departs from other scholarly fields of inquiry. We will study the stories of those who have been marginalized in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of the United States due to their class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, and level of ability. We will explore contemporary American Studies concerns like racial and class formation, the production of space and place, the consumption and circulation of culture, and transnational histories.
Sophomore Priority
- Fall 2024, Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
-
AMST 321 Indigenous Chicago: Indigenous Histories and Futures in Zhegagoynak 6 credits
Before Chicago as we know it today existed, many Indigenous nations had long standing relationships with this place. They knew it as Zhegagoynak, Gaa-zhigaagwanzhikaag, Zhigaagong, Šikaakonki, Shekâkôheki, Sekakoh, and Guušge honak, among others. This course emerges from four years of community-engaged curriculum development and examines Chicago histories through five themes: Chicago's lands and environment, Chicago as a Native place, Chicago as a place of convergence, activism and resistance in Chicago, and community-driven education movements in Chicago. Drawing from History, American Studies, Education, and Indigenous Studies, students will also examine how research and curricula can center Indigenous perspectives and sources.
-
EDUC 245 School Reform: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow 6 credits
This course explores major issues in the history of school reform in the United States, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. Readings and discussions examine the role of education in American society, the various and often competing goals of school reformers, and the dynamics of educational change. With particular focus on the American high school, this course looks at why so much reform has produced so little change.
X-List AMST 245
Not offered in 2024-25
-
ENTS 307 Wilderness Field Studies: Grand Canyon 6 credits
This course is the second half of a two-course sequence focused on the study of wilderness in American society and culture. The course will begin with an Off-Campus Studies program at Grand Canyon National Park, where we will learn about the natural and human history of the Grand Canyon region, examine contemporary issues facing the park, meet with officials from the National Park Service and other local experts, conduct research, and experience the park through hiking and camping. The course will culminate in spring term with the completion and presentation of a major research project.
HIST 306 required previous winter term, Extra Time
Not offered in 2024-25
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies WR2 Writing Requirement 2
-
Student has completed any of the following course(s): HIST 306-American Wilderness with a grade of C- or better during the immediately preceding term.
-
HIST 112 Freedom of Expression: A Global History 6 credits
Celebrated as the bedrock of democracy, freedom of expression is often seen as an American or western value. Yet the concept has a rich and global history. In this course we will track the long and turbulent history of freedom of expression from ancient Athens and medieval Islamic societies to the Enlightenment and the drive for censorship in totalitarian and colonial societies. Among the questions we will consider are: How have the parameters of free expression changed and developed over time? What is the relationship between free speech and political protest? How has free speech itself been weaponized? How does an understanding of the history of free speech help us think about the challenges of combating hatred and misinformation in today’s internet age?
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 116 Intro to Indigenous Histories, 1887-present 6 credits
Many Americans grow up with a fictionalized view of Indigenous people (sometimes also called Native Americans/American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians within the U.S. context). Understanding Indigenous peoples’ histories, presents, and possible futures requires moving beyond these stereotypes and listening to Indigenous perspectives. In this class, we will begin to learn about Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific through tribal histories, legislation, Supreme Court cases, and personal narratives. The course will focus on the period from 1887 to 2018 with major themes including (among others) agency, resistance, resilience, settler colonialism, discrimination, and structural racism.
-
HIST 122 U.S. Women’s History to 1877 6 credits
Gender, race, and class shaped women’s participation in the arenas of work, family life, culture, and politics in the United States from the colonial period to the late nineteenth century. We will examine diverse women’s experiences of colonization, industrialization, slavery and Reconstruction, religion, sexuality and reproduction, and social reform. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources, as well as historiographic articles outlining major frameworks and debates in the field of women’s history.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 123 U.S. Women’s History Since 1877 6 credits
In the twentieth century women participated in the redefinition of politics and the state, sexuality and family life, and work and leisure as the United States became a modern, largely urban society. We will explore how the dimensions of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality shaped diverse women’s experiences of these historical changes. Topics will include: immigration, the expansion of the welfare system and the consumer economy, labor force segmentation and the world wars, and women’s activism in civil rights, labor, peace and feminist movements.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 125 African American History I: From Africa to the Civil War 6 credits
This course is a survey of early African American history. It will introduce students to major themes and events while also covering historical interpretations and debates in the field. Core themes of the course include migration, conflict, and culture. Beginning with autonomous African politics, the course traces the development of the United States through the experiences of enslaved and free African American women and men to the Civil War. The main aim of the course is for students to become familiar with key issues and developments in African American history and their centrality to understanding U.S. history.
-
HIST 126 African American History II 6 credits
This course analyzes Black Freedom activism, its goals, and protagonists from Reconstruction until today. Topics include the evolution of racial segregation and its legal and de facto expressions in the South and across the nation, the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance, Black activism in the New Deal era, the effects of World War II and the Cold War, mass activism in the 1950s and 1960s, white supremacist resistance against Black rights, Black Power activism and Black Internationalism, the “War on Drugs,” racialized welfare state reforms, and police brutality, the election of Barack Obama, and the path to #BlackLivesMatter today.
-
HIST 200 Historians for Hire 3 credits
Designed to give students experiences and skills in public history and history education, this three-credit course offers students a choice among projects connected to local organizations and some partners farther afield. Students will have the opportunity to develop skills connected to archiving, building online materials such as maps and websites, and learning historical methods like oral history interviews or exhibit design. Most projects involve close collaborations with local community organizations, allowing students to become more connected with organizations outside of Carleton.
Extra time
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 202 Oral History Research Methods: Theory, Ethics, and Practice 6 credits
This course introduces oral history methods in historical research. Students will examine power and authority, personal and collective memory, trust, representation, and community benefit in oral history projects. This iteration of the course will emphasize scholarship from Indigenous Studies and Indigenous scholars whose work employs oral histories. Students will deepen and apply their learning through an Academic Civic Engagement partnership with a local Indigenous organization; please note that this course requires some travel to Minneapolis, which will be organized by the professor. While prior coursework in history, Indigenous Studies, or American Studies would be useful, it is not mandatory.
Extra time, 1-2 field trips to the Twin Cities to conduct interviews
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 203 American Indian Education 6 credits
This course introduces students to the history of settler education for Indigenous students. In the course, we will engage themes of resistance, assimilation, and educational violence through an investigation of nation-to-nation treaties, federal education legislation, court cases, student memoirs, film, fiction, and artwork. Case studies will illustrate student experiences in mission schools, boarding schools, and public schools between the 1600s and the present, asking how Native people have navigated the educational systems created for their assimilation and how schooling might function as a tool for Indigenous resurgence in the future.
Extra time
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 205 American Environmental History 6 credits
Environmental concerns, conflicts, and change mark the course of American history, from the distant colonial past to our own day. This course will consider the nature of these eco-cultural developments, focusing on the complicated ways that human thought and perception, culture and society, and natural processes and biota have all combined to forge Americans’ changing relationship with the natural world. Topics will include Native American subsistence strategies, Euroamerican settlement, industrialization, urbanization, consumption, and the environmental movement. As we explore these issues, one of our overarching goals will be to develop an historical context for thinking deeply about contemporary environmental dilemmas.
- Winter 2025, Spring 2025
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
HIST 212 The Era of the American Revolution 6 credits
How Revolutionary was the American Revolution? This class will examine the American Revolution as both a process and a phenomenon. For whom, for what, and how was the United States created? We will consider the relationship of the American Revolution to social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological change in the lives of Americans from the founding fathers to the disenfranchised, focusing on the period 1750-1790.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 213 Politics and Protest in the New Nation 6 credits
In the first years of the United States, men and women of all races had to learn what it meant to live in the nation created by the U.S. Constitution. This class will focus on the American attempts to form a more perfect union, paying close attention to the place of slavery, Native dispossession, sexuality, and politics during the years 1787-1840. Throughout the course we will examine the ways in which the politics and protests of the early Republic continue to shape the current United States.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 216 History Beyond the Walls 6 credits
This course will examine the world of history outside the walls of academia. Looking at secondary-school education, museums, and public policy, we will explore the ways in which both general and specialized publics learn and think about history. A central component of the course will be a civic engagement project.
Extra Time Required.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 218 Black Women’s History 6 credits
This course focuses on the history of black women in the United States. The class will offer an overview of the lived experiences of women of African descent in this country from enslavement to the present. We will focus on themes of labor, reproduction, health, community, family, resistance, activism, etc., highlighting the diversity of black women’s experiences and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by the intersections of their race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Extra Time
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 220 From Blackface to Blaxploitation: Black History and/in Film 6 credits
This course focuses on the representation of African American history in popular US-American movies. It will introduce students to the field of visual history, using cinema as a primary source. Through films from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the seminar will analyze African American history, (pop-)cultural depictions, and memory culture. We will discuss subjects, narrative arcs, stylistic choices, production design, performative and film industry practices, and historical receptions of movies. The topics include slavery, racial segregation and white supremacy, the Black Freedom Movement, controversies and conflicts in Black communities, Black LGBTQIA+ history, ghettoization and police brutality, Black feminism, and Afrofuturism.
Extra time
-
HIST 226 U.S. Consumer Culture 6 credits
In the period after 1880, the growth of a mass consumer society recast issues of identity, gender, race, class, family, and political life. We will explore the development of consumer culture through such topics as advertising and mass media, the body and sexuality, consumerist politics in the labor movement, and the response to the Americanization of consumption abroad. We will read contemporary critics such as Thorstein Veblen, as well as historians engaged in weighing the possibilities of abundance against the growth of corporate power.
X-List AMST 231, WMST 227
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 228 Civil Rights and Black Power 6 credits
This course treats the struggle for racial justice from World War II through the 1960s. Histories, journalism, music, and visual media illustrate black and white elites and grassroots people allied in this momentous epoch that ranges from a southern integrationist vision to northern Black Power militancy. The segregationist response to black freedom completes the study.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 229 Working with Gender in U.S. History 6 credits
Historically work has been a central location for the constitution of gender identities for both men and women; at the same time, cultural notions of gender have shaped the labor market. We will investigate the roles of race, class, and ethnicity in shaping multiple sexual divisions of labor and the ways in which terms such as skill, bread-winning and work itself were gendered. Topics will include domestic labor, slavery, industrialization, labor market segmentation, protective legislation, and the labor movement.
-
HIST 230 Black Americans and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction 6 credits
What does a most turbulent period in U.S. history look like from the perspectives of Black women and men? What role did Black thought and resistance play in shaping the outcome of the war? What was interracial democracy during Reconstruction and why was it ultimately overthrown? These are a few of the myriad questions we will seek to answer by studying the central role of Black Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. We will examine how Black people participated in and shaped the politics of this period and we will critically engage the meanings of freedom, emancipation, and democracy.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 293 Small Group Study 1 credits
- Winter 2025
- No Exploration
-
HIST 301 Indigenous Histories at Carleton 6 credits
Carleton’s new campus land acknowledgement affirms that this is Dakota land, but how did Carleton come to be here? What are the histories of Indigenous faculty, students, and staff at Carleton? In this course, students will investigate Indigenous histories on our campus by conducting original research about how Carleton acquired its landbase, its historic relationships to Dakota and Anishinaabeg people, histories of on-campus activism, the shifting demographics of Native students on campus, and the histories of Indigenous faculty and staff, among others. Students will situate these histories within the broader context of federal Indian policies and Indigenous resistance.
-
HIST 306 American Wilderness 6 credits
To many Americans, wild lands are among the nation’s most treasured places. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Joshua Tree, Grand Canyon – the names alone stir the heart, the mind, and the imagination. But where do those thoughts and feelings come from, and how have they both reflected and shaped American culture, society, and nature over the last three centuries? These are the central issues and questions that we will pursue in this seminar and in its companion course, ENTS 307 Wilderness Field Studies: Grand Canyon (which includes an Off-Campus Studies program at Grand Canyon National Park). Recommended Preparation: HIST 205 is recommended, but not required.
Spring Break OCS Program Course. ENTS 307 required for Spring Term registration.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
HIST 308 American Cities and Nature 6 credits
Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. HIST 205 is recommended but not required.
HIST 205 is recommended but not required.
-
HIST 315 America’s Founding 6 credits
This course is part of an off-campus winter break program that includes two linked courses in the fall and winter. The creation and establishment of the United States was a contested and uncertain event stretched over more than half a century. For whom, for what, and how was the United States created? In what ways do the conflicts and contradictions of the nation’s eighteenth-century founding shape today’s America? We will examine how the nation originated in violent civil war and in political documents that simultaneously offered glorious promises and a “covenant with death.” Our nuanced understanding of the American Revolution and Early Republic will underpin our ability to tell these stories to the wider public.
Participation in OCS History Winter Break Program
Not offered in 2024-25
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
Student has completed any of the following course(s): One History (HIST) course excluding Independent Studies courses with a grade of C- or better.
-
HIST 316 Presenting America’s Founding 6 credits
This course is the second half of a two-course sequence focused on the study of the founding of the United States in American public life. The course will begin with a two-week off-campus study program during winter break in Washington, D.C and Boston, where we will visit world-class museums and historical societies, meet with museum professionals, and learn about the goals and challenges of history museums, the secrets to successful exhibitions, and the work of museum curators and directors. The course will culminate in the winter term with the completion of an exhibit created in conjunction with one of the museums located on Boston’s Freedom Trail.
Participation in Winter Break History Program
Not offered in 2024-25
- HI, Humanistic Inquiry IDS, Intercultural Domestic Studies
-
Student has completed any of the following course(s): HIST 315 – America's Founding with a grade of C- or better.
-
HIST 320 The Progressive Era? 6 credits
Was the Progressive Era progressive? It was a period of social reform, labor activism, and woman suffrage, but also of Jim Crow, corporate capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. These are among the topics that can be explored in research papers on this contradictory era. We will begin by reading a brief text that surveys the major subject areas and relevant historiography of the period. The course will center on the writing of a 25-30 page based on primary research, which will be read and critiqued by members of the seminar.
-
HIST 334 Voyages of Understanding 6 credits
This seminar will examine the phenomenon of travel across historical periods and around the globe. We will look at motivations for travel; ideas about place, space, and geography; travel as site of encounter and conflict with peoples of different religions, ethnicities, and cultures; the effect of travel on individual and group identity; and representations of travel, cultural contact, and geography in texts, maps, and images. We will work on key research skills, and each student will carry out an original research project leading to a ca. 25-page research paper.
Not offered in 2024-25
-
RELG 140 Religion and American Culture 6 credits
This course explores the colorful, contested history of religion in American culture. While surveying the main contours of religion in the United States from the colonial era to the present, the course concentrates on a series of historical moments that reveal tensions between a quest for a (Protestant) American consensus and an abiding religious and cultural pluralism.
Not offered in 2024-25