PROGRAM IN AMERICAN STUDIES

This course explores the comparative history of various racial and ethnic groups in the twentieth-century United States. While tensions between and relations among African Americans and whites have shaped U.S. history in important ways, this course also recognizes the historical significance of multiple racial and ethnic groups, particularly Asian Americans and Latinos. We will consider the histories of the various groups alongside one another and U.S. History more generally, as well as intersections among the various groups, and will consider how law shapes (and is shaped by) the racial and ethnic categories in question.

1968 was a convulsive, world-shaking and world-making year. Assassinations, street riots, protests against a seemingly endless war, cultural experimentation, new forms of art, music, and film…and on and on. This was true for the US and around the world. Rock and roll was eating at the roots of Communism. Men and women of various religious commitments and inheritances contributed to the year’s excitements and dramas. This course will look at religious innovation, protest, and moral and social commitments during this difficult year. Readings include the visions of a South American mystic; antiwar documents; African American radical Christianity; the liturgies of Catholic war protesters; and the plays of a famous Czech rebel. We will also look at examples of the year’s cinema, including the little appreciated and much reviled (and rightly so!) “Wild in the Streets,” which stars, among others, a very young Richard Pryor.

1968 was a year of revolt, reaction, and global disruption as cities and campuses around the world plunged into social and political unrest that cut across divides between East and West, North and South, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, communist and non-communist. This class will examine key moments and movements that defined the year and explore what they shared, how they differed, and what became of them; it will consider how and why popular and youth protests spread across diverse societies; it will revisit the arguments, aims, achievements, and limits of the '68 generation; and it will ask what happened to the people, ideas, and sensibilities of 1968, investigating how and why the ferment the '68ers represented evolved and faded. Throughout we will maintain a dual focus on the national origins, aims, and context of the '68 rebellions and the transnational structures and dynamics that shaped them as we reflect on the interplay of the local, national, and transnational contemporary politics. In so doing we will explore how American political culture looks differently when viewed from an international perspective.

This course takes up the uncontrolled, crude, hysterical forms of minority political speech summarily dismissed as "ranting" to ask what does one do with "bad subjects"? For every foundational manifesto or inspirational speech that followed U.S. civil rights movements, there were rants considered too threatening, paranoid, or overemotional to be appropriate for mainstream democratic debate. We will recuperate some of these rants as political documents with their own strategic purposes as well as viewing them as speculative literature that reimagines who gets to say what, when, and how. Texts will include writing from Valerie Solanas, Amiri Baraka, David Wojnarowicz, and Jarett Kobek; artworks from Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper; and films from Sidney Lumet and Spike Lee.

The United States folk music revival is typically thought of as an antimodern, even a Luddite, movement. Acoustic guitars, camp fires, overly sincere singers, and "Kumbaya" politics are the cliches many call to mind. To study it through digital means, however, reveals important connections between the history of the revival and issues of technology, culture, and politics in the modern world. In this research seminar, we examine the history of the US folk music revival through readings, audio listening, documentary films, seminar discussions, and, most of all, extensive digital analysis to investigate these connections. Working in platforms such as Omeka and WordPress, with tools ranging from Audacity sound editing software to mapping, annotation, and timeline programs, we use the archives of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival (in Northwestern's Special Collections), the Old Town School of Folk Music (in Chicago), and the Alan Lomax Collection (online) to probe what was at stake in the folk revival in relation to American culture and politics; questions of race, class, gender, age, and region; and the strange workings of music-making, memory, and power. As we do so, we ask how digital technologies might help us to interpret history more meaningfully; simultaneously, we explore how both the folk revival itself and the methods of historical study might be crucial to understanding our contemporary digital moment more effectively. (HISTORY 395-0-22, HUM 325-4-20)

Bad News. That is what Americans are experiencing as a result of the corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today there are six major companies that control much of what people read, hear and see. Those firms are AOLTime Warner, General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Viacom/CBS, and Bertelsman. As the firms passed from largely family owned to publicly traded companies, the pressure for profit from Wall Street has led to cutbacks in the size of the firm's news divisions and a change in news story values that have "softened" the types of news that people see on television. This course will begin with an examination of the monetary forces that are driving the industry away from its primary mission of information. Critics, of whom the professor is one, contend that the drive for increasing profits is coming at the expense of both the quality and quantity of news that appear on television and radio, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. The everdiminishing number of news providers is also threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society. (POLI-SCI 390-0-25)

In this course students will examine themes in the history of health in the United States, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will focus on the intersections between health and environment, gender, race, law, and region. We will consider questions such as what's the impact of environmental change in transforming medical, scientific, and lay understanding and experience of health and illness? What's the role of illness in shaping changing perceptions of the environment? How has race been central to the construction and treatment of disease? How has gender shaped conceptions of and approaches to health? What historical role have issues of gender, race, and class played in the inequitable distribution of pollution and in activist involvement in combating environmental hazards? How has changing food production and culture shaped health? This course assumes no previous coursework in the field, and students with a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines are encouraged to participate.

When Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, many felt that a new era of precarity for women had begun. The defunding of Planned Parenthood, the Muslim ban, assault on pro-choice legislation, rescinding of protections for transgender students, the President's own history of sexual assault - to name only a few - all seemed to present an unprecedented dystopia for women across the political spectrum. Indeed, this course begins by asking how we can talk about feminism in a Trump era? Taking an historical approach to feminism this course asks how many of the issues facing American women today are familiar ones; and what might a Trump administration mean for feminism, both broadly speaking in its global iterations and on more local, micro levels of quotidian experience? How has the conception, performance, politics, embodiment and circulation of feminism been reconceived? (GNDR_ST 350-3-22, GNDR_ST 371-0-21, COMM_ST 395-0-25)

What is the history of cultural criticism in the United States? Where is it headed? How do its past and future relate to each other? This "methods seminar" for 15 students combines historical examination with fieldwork at contemporary art museums and performance spaces. Students read extensively in the history of cultural criticism, meet with museum and arts professionals, and experiment with new, digital modes of critical writing. (HUM 325-6-21, HIST 393-0-26)

Unlike most courses, the purpose of this course is to confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present one's work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we shall undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are also invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.

Unlike most courses, the purpose of this course is to confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present one's work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we shall undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are also invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.

Unlike most courses, the purpose of this course is to confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present one's work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we shall undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are also invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.