United States (US)

Students in this course will analyze and evaluate a very select number of "pivotal moments" over the past four centuries of American history. As an introduction to historical thinking and argumentation, the course will combine close scrutiny of documents from the past with an awareness of  interpretive issues of contingency, determinism, and historical agency raised by leading contemporary historians. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This introductory course will explore the historical roots of current events in the United States. This course demonstrates how history is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives and why understanding history is important for understanding the present and navigating the future. We will focus on case studies—such as immigration and borders, computers and society, and race and whiteness—and expect the syllabus to evolve in real time depending on what is in the news during the quarter. This class serves as an introductory course for History majors, but is open to all students. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US. Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course examines the historical processes of identity formation among varied groups of African-descended people in the United States, problematizing the concept of "African-American" by interrogating the history of the Gullah-Geeche, the Black Seminoles, the Freedmen (Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw), and the Creoles of the Gulf Coast (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama). In particular, students will examine the ethnogenesis of these groups and, where appropriate, the phenomenon of emerging linguistic distinctiveness, and the historical relationship between linguistic minority groups and Anglo-American hegemony. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course equips students with research methods, critical frameworks, and interview skills to document the lives of Black alumni and contribute to an archive of oral sources on Black history at Dartmouth. Students will be immersed in the theory and practice of oral history, a field in which historians conduct collaborative interviews with narrators to create new records of past events. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Class of 2023 and Before Major Distributive: US.
Class of 2024 and Beyond Major Distributives: US, modern.

This course examines the colonial origins of the Unites States and the ways in which Americans perpetuated, challenged and transformed empire in their dealings with non-American nations and peoples between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Key topics include U.S. relations with Indian nations, the Mexican-American War, the pursuit of informal empire in East Asia and the Pacific, and the colonization of Liberia. Dist: SOC or INT; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course explores America's interactions with the world and its emergence as a global imperial power in the decades after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Key topics include the conquest of the Great Plains, the War of 1898, U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, Wilsonianism and the U.S. embrace of "total war" during World War II. Dist: SOC or INT; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course examines U.S. relations with the wider world during the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. In addition to America's global rivalry with the Soviet Union, students will investigate American responses to decolonization, globalization and the emergence of global norms of human rights. They will also study U.S. interventions in "Third World" nations such as Cuba, Guatemala and Vietnam, as well as U.S. efforts to exercise unprecedented forms of global hegemony in the post-Cold War period. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course examines the historical and contemporary sporting experiences primarily of Black Americans. The decision to refer to this class as a "Black" experience is deliberate, as we will briefly interrogate how race and sports functions for the Black diaspora in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. Despite brief examinations of the diaspora, this class uses sports history as a critical lens to understand American history. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

Current public discussions of immigration are deeply rooted in centuries-long conversations about who is allowed into the country and what it means to be an American. Drawing explicitly on the collective work of the "hashtag syllabus" movement, this course seeks to contextualize current debates over immigration reform, integration, and citizenship by considering migration from multiple perspectives—not just Ellis Island, but the Rio Bravo, Angel Island, Congo Square, and the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course will focus on the history, culture and literature of Los Angeles, California, the second largest city in the United States. We will briefly examine its founding in the eighteenth century as a Northwest outpost of the Spanish empire in the Americas, and its origins and evolution as a Mexican pueblo and U.S. city in the nineteenth century. The majority of our attention will be on the historical and contemporary struggles of people who have migrated togreater Los Angeles to create the unique, multiethnic, multiracial metropolis. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course provides an introductory overview of Asian immigration to the United States from the 18th to 21st centuries. We address the following questions: Why did Asians move to the United States? How did they change American history and culture? And how has the United States responded to their presence? Topics include the formation of early ethnic enclaves; anti-Asian immigration legislature; Western imperialism in Asia; national identity, incarceration, surveillance, and religion; and Asian American activism. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Class of 2023 and Before Major Distributive: US.
Class of 2024 and Beyond Major Distributives: US, modern.

The climate crisis is no longer a prediction about the future, but an experience of the present. I­t also has a past, and in order to imagine what will come next we need to understand how we got here. While primarily concerned with the U.S. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the era of petro-intensive growth in the country that consumes 30% of the earth's resources for 5% of its population--our inquiry will require explicit reflection on the longer historical roots of energy use and the global framework of resource extraction. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

The years between the close of the American Revolution and the start of the Age of Jackson have been described as the "most neglected, if not the most despised period of American history." Without the drama of the Revolutionary years or the ominous tension of the Civil War's approach, the Early Republic has been seen as a dull interval between the country's defining events. Now, new methods in the study of American history have completely changed the way we understand the period. This course will focus on the seminal task of nation building, when distinctively American political parties, cities and villages, gender roles, educational systems, decorative arts, cultural institutions, attitudes toward Native peoples, architecture and economic policies took form. Thomas Jefferson actively shaped the debates over these issues, and he serves as the pivotal figure in our study of the formation of a new and specifically American culture in the Early Republican period. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course provides the history of pan-Indian movements in Indigenous North America from 1680 to the present. In the current era of self-determination, tribal sovereignty, and Indigenous nationhood, we perhaps sometimes forget that pan-Indian movements have played a significant part in the history and experiences of Native peoples of North America. We will explore the many ways in which Native peoples have aligned themselves with other tribal nations religious, military, educational, economic, and environmental movements, in the process cutting across linguistic, cultural, religious, and national lines. Indigenous North Americans have deployed pan-Indianism as a strategy to confront both international such as colonialism and the struggles for control of contested Borderlands, and more regional and localized forces. Taken in its entirety, understanding pan-Indianism is essential to understanding the history of Native North America. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course focuses on the histories of Indigenous peoples in the borderlands of North America across time in both geographic and thematic contexts. Viewing Native America as an incredibly complex series of borderlands is a useful interpretive model for better understanding the history of Native peoples. Lectures, readings, and class discussion will focus on elements such as cultural contact, conquest and colonialism, missionization, citizenship, gender, and nation. While exploring these various themes, we will touch on some familiar territory such as frontiers and middle grounds, but we will also question our own personal, and often, region-based expertise in order to unpack a more nuanced view of Indigenous borderlands and their significance. Dist: INT or SOC; WCult: NW.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

Serving as the final course in a three-quarter survey of Native American history, this class reviews Native history from the late 19th century to the present, focusing on the interplay between large institutions and structures – such as federal and state governments, or the US legal system – and the lived, local experience of tribal communities. The major themes followed throughout the course of the term include: historical narrative (and what it justifies or explains), place and space (how local and national entities define territories), and indigeneity (indigenous identity). Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course will explore two related questions: how can spatial and place-based thinking benefit historical scholarship? More specifically, how can we combine fieldwork, archival research, and the use of digital tools to help us recover hidden aspects of local history? To answer these questions, this course will include three parts. First, a seminar component will allow students to think global and act local. Students will analyze and discuss spatial history and place-based history projects from around the globe while also evaluating primary historical sources on local and regional history. Second, a fieldwork component will allow students to visit local archives and the places they are studying and examine the way history has alternatively been inscribed in or erased from the landscape. Third, a lab component will offer students the chance to learn new skills using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software to map local history over space and time. Dist: SOC; WCult: NW.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This lecture course surveys the history of reproductive medicine and health in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on histories of childbearing, pregnancy, fertility, contraception, reproductive biotechnology, and reproductive healthcare, centering their significance within overlapping political, social, cultural, medical, and scientific contexts. Topics include the management of reproduction within U.S. slavery and empire, reproductive medicine and concepts of race, competing assertions of professional authority over pregnancy and childbearing, eugenics and sterilization, movements for reproductive rights and community healthcare, technologies of reproductive medicine (including prenatal screening and assisted reproductive technology), and present-day disparities in access to and quality of reproductive care. Throughout the term, we will pay particular attention to intersections with historical and present-day formations of race, gender, disability, citizenship, and kinship. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course will focus on the history, culture and literature of Los Angeles, California, the second largest city in the United States. We will briefly examine its founding in the eighteenth century as a Northwest outpost of the Spanish empire in the Americas, and its origins and evolution as a Mexican pueblo and U.S. city in the nineteenth century. The majority of our attention will be on the historical and contemporary struggles of people of color in metro-Los Angeles throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

Treaties enabled European colonists to establish a foothold in North America and charted the territorial expansion of the United States. Indian people were often deceived by treaties and they referred to them as "pen and ink witch-craft." But the hundreds of Indian treaties generated unique records of cultural encounter. Each treaty had its own story and cast of characters. Working with the records of key treaties, this seminar will examine the protocols of Indian diplomacy, the maneuverings and agendas of the different participants, as well as the outcomes and legacies of Indian treaties. Open to Juniors and Seniors with written permission of the instructor. Dist: INT or TMV; WCult: NW.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US.

This seminar examines the evolving meaning of the U.S. border, the history of whiteness as a spoken and unspoken requirement for full American citizenship and the ways that stereotyping has been used to enforce race, gender, ethnic labor hierarchies from the first European/First Peoples contacts, through the era of slavery and early nineteenth century immigration. The second half of the course examines how race, ethnicity, class and gender have shaped the self-identification of many different kinds of immigrant groups from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century with a continued focus on evolving meanings of whiteness. In the course's final unit, we examine racial and ethnic tensions in U.S. cities that have been the destination for large waves of immigrants through the 1990s. Dist: SOC; WCult: CI.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This seminar investigates the ideas and practices that constructed and deconstructed empire in North Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It explores the perspectives of those involved in advancing and resisting European colonialism as they debated how to manage political, economic, and religious structures that bridged the Atlantic. The course traces evolving scholarly approaches to analyzing political culture and equips students to undertake research in early American political history with published and archival records. Dist: TMV; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US, pre-1700/pre-1800.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, premodern.

Formerly dismissed as the decade when "it seemed like nothing happened," the seventies are increasingly understood as a decisive period when a new political economy took shape, new forms of citizenship competed for influence, and new cultural forms emerged. Even disco has gotten a second look. By shedding light on a significant incident, movement, art form, cultural phenomenon, debate, organization, or development of the era, you will contribute to this ongoing project of historical reassessment. Dist: SOC; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This seminar examines the ideas and practices of American democracy at the moment of its emergence. After an initial couple weeks of defining terms and orienting ourselves in the larger context of modern democracy, our readings and discussions will consider such key issues as: expansions and contractions in voting rights; the role of public opinion; the place of minorities in majoritarian government; the tensions between American democracy and American slavery; and the contested debates over the citizenship of women and African Americans. Dist: TMV; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.

This course invites students to study the history of twentieth-century social movements through close primary source analysis and historiographic debate. We'll identify the precipitating events or crises that cultivate particular social movements, but we'll also examine their quieter dimensions, including their aftermaths, "half-lives," and influence on subsequent movements.

We begin by considering how historians define social movements, as well as theoretical frameworks that circulate between history and other disciplines to understand them. Through our close study of four social movements (and your own research) we'll explore the relationship between individual experience and collective mobilization. We'll ask how social movements have been received and reshaped by the institutions they target, and identify the means by which opponents resisted social movement claims. In so doing, we'll ask the following questions: How have scholars decided when a social movement begins and ends? How does periodization shape our understanding of their impact? How have changes in broadcast media and digital technology altered the organization, communication, and historical record of social movements? Do they pose particular interpretive challenges for historians? Throughout the course, we'll identify continuities in worldviews, moral commitments, narratives, and historical memory that have characterized social movement genealogies across the twentieth century.

Coursework will immerse students in historiographic debates and extend those conversations through assignments in which students identify and present primary sources to the class. We'll continue our collective preparation for primary source analysis through visits to Rauner Archive and Special Collections. The course will culminate with a 20-25 page research paper on a social movement of your choosing. Dist: TMV; WCult: W.

Major distributives (Class of 2023 and Before): US.
Major distributives (Class of 2024 and Beyond): US, modern.