Seminar for Majors (301-2-20)

Topic

From Local to Global: National

Instructors

Michael Allen
847/467-3979
Harris Hall - Room 342

Meeting Info

Meets in Non-General PurposeRm: Fri 1:00PM - 3:50PM

Overview of class

Seminar for Majors course aims to provide a "how-to" of American Studies from an integrative, multiracial, and socio-cultural perspective. Taking U.S. American cultures as a site for testing classic and contemporary theories about how society works, this seminar in American Studies serves to introduce resources and techniques for interdisciplinary research. Students will be exposed to and experiment with a wide range of current theoretical and methodological approaches applied in American Studies and contributing disciplinary fields. The goal of the course is not only for students to develop knowledge of main currents in the field of American Studies but also to become practitioners through a series of assignments that will permit students to exercise their newfound skills. For instance, as students develop rhetorical analyses, describe and evaluate visual culture, or conduct and analyze interview data, they will also examine themes such as national narratives, civil rights and immigration, and the historical and social meanings of work, discipline, and justice.

Learning Objectives

• Read, analyze, and evaluate primary sources to gain direct knowledge of the thought, actions, and conditions that helped define the American nation and national identity, and which form the basis of critical inquiry, argument, and empirical proof in American studies.
• Read, analyze, and evaluate secondary sources that offer scholarly interpretations of key questions in the history of American national consciousness and national culture, thereby developing proficiency in the arguments, methodologies, documentation, and debate that define American studies as a field.
• Engage in reasoned, respectful, evidence-based discussion and debate with other interpreters of American culture in verbal and written forms.
• Analyze, synthesize, and organize cultural sources to construct accurate, sophisticated, and persuasive verbal and written arguments in answer to historical questions.
• Appreciate the variety of historical experience and the multiplicity of subjectivity in order to grasp history's complex and contested meanings for the present.

Class Materials (Required)

All supplied on Canvas

Class Notes

• Consider how differences of race, ethnicity, religion, region, gender, sexuality, class, and politics shaped and were shaped by prevailing concepts of American identity and challenges to the same.
• Explore how practices, conditions, and ideologies of nationalism and national identity motivated, influenced, undermined, or reinforced systems of hierarchy and power within the United States across time and space.
• Reflect on their relationship to these processes and their position within these histories.

Class Attributes

Department Majors Only