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Major issues in American history

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2011-2012

Admission requirements

Relevant BA degree.

Description

This course focuses on a few of the scholarly debates about American history that historians have engaged in. Exploring classic works and recent studies about aspects of American history such as the American Revolution, American foreign policy, slavery, and immigration history, students will become acquainted with the major facts and aspects of these topics of American history and the presuppositions (theoretical and otherwise) and biases of the historians discussing them.

Course objectives

The course aims to make students familiar with a few topics of American history, the academic debates about these topics, and the theoretical issues involved in the debates.

Timetable

See course schedule.

Mode of instruction

Class discussion of individual authors and of class presentations.
Independent study of academic literature.

Assessment method

Participation in class discussions, presentation, and paper.

Blackboard

Yes

Reading list

Stanley Elkins, Slavery (1959)
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (1985)
Bell Hooks, Yearning (1990)
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993)
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (2000)
David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness (2005)
George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (2007)
Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007)

Registration

Via uSis.

Contact information

E-mail: Dr. E.F. van de Bilt.