HSTAA 231 A: Race And American History

Description: We will survey U.S. history, from its beginnings to today, by exploring how race has enabled conceptions of the American nation and empire and shaped everyday practices and social interactions among different peoples. How have racial concepts, racial representations, and racial practices fundamentally defined power dynamics in the United States? From slave revolts to the Black Lives Matter movement, how have various individuals and organizations framed and pursued racial justice?

HSTAA 231 Syllabus

Syllabus Attachment (on department and university policies)

Chicago Style Guide

September 26  Race, Nation, Power

September 27 Readings

Dunbar-Ortiz, 1-14 [pages for week 1 uploaded only].

1. George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness,” from The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1-23.

2. “16,000 Readers Shared Their Experiences of Being Told to ‘Go Back.’ Here Are Some of Their Stories,” New York Times, July 19, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/reader-center/trump-go-back-stories.html

3. John Eligon, “The El Paso Screed, and the Racist Doctrine Behind It,” New York Times, August 7, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/el-paso-shooting-racism.html

4. “Declaration of Independence (1776)” and “Constitution of the United States (1787),” in Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, Documents of American Constitutional and Legal History, second ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54-58, 85-97.

5. “Naturalization Act, March 26, 1790,” in The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience, ed. Franklin Odo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 13-14. 

October 1 Founding a White Republic

October 3 Challenging and Expanding Slavery

October 4 Reading

6. Walter Johnson, “Reading Bodies and Marking Race,” from Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135-161.

October 8 Making Race Scientific

October 10 Civilization and Colonization

October 11 Reading

7. “Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857),” in Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, Documents of American Constitutional and Legal History, second ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 366-372.

October 15 Striking for Freedom