HIST 269 - Topics in United States, Latin American or Canadian History

Credits: 3-4 A course offered from time to time, depending on student interest and staff availability, on a selected topic or problem in United States, Latin American or Canadian history. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Spring 2021, HIST 269A-01: Topics in United States, Latin American or Canadian History: Race and Racism in the Americas (3). This course analyzes the historical development of the idea of race across the early-Modern Atlantic world, and analyzes how it influenced the history of peoples, nations, and knowledge in the Americas. Focusing on natural history, scholastic theology, and other authoritative sources of social and natural knowledge, we will analyze the extent to which such factors as religion, science, colonialism, and capitalism have influenced the historical evolution of both the idea of race and the practice of racism. We will then concentrate on the Modern era to explore how the dynamic interplay between the local and the global influenced the idea of race. Drawing on national case studies from across the Americas during the nineteenth and twentieth-century, we will study what historian Thomas C. Holt calls “the work that race does”—that is, how race has operated in distinct local-historical contexts to generate political exclusion, social marginalization, economic exploitation, and/or cultural denigration. (HU) Gildner.

Winter 2021, HIST 269A-01: Topics in United States, Latin American or Canadian History: Black Radical Women (3). African-diasporic women have consistently imagined new futures in their pursuits of freedom and justice. In so doing, they have resisted patriarchy, racial violence, and state-sanctioned oppression. This course will offer an introduction to the theories and activism that have characterized Black women’s radicalism from the nineteenth century to the present. By examining sources including writings by Frances Harper; articles by Claudia Jones; songs by Miriam Makeba; contemporary, digital activist campaigns; and more, students will evaluate how Black women have critiqued racism, sexism, and class exploitation. The course will also investigate how women navigated racial, gender, and class dynamics within activist organizations. Key topics for consideration include abolition, suffrage, Garveyism, Négritude, the anti-apartheid movement, Black Power, and #BlackLivesMatter. Ultimately, students will analyze Black women’s roles in movements for Black liberation, feminism, and Black internationalism. (HU) Dennie. FDR: HU