This course explores the ways migration has shaped American identity and citizenship over time. It introduces students to a range of methodological approaches and traces the immigrant experience across the political, economic, social, and even military history of the United States. In assessing a chronological range of events, institutions, and ideas regarding race and belonging, students examine how the ongoing tension between ethnic and civic nationalism has impacted labor markets, cultural production, and even foreign policy from the colonial era to the present. Throughout, we pair analysis of historiography with a consideration of primary-source material drawn on by different approaches, which include unpublished correspondence, government reports, audiovisual productions, legislative documents, magazine articles, and census data. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to apply some historical insight to contemporary debates surrounding immigration in the United States, a topic that continues to dominate political discourse from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill.

This course introduces students to the ways in which the New Deal reconciled democracy and capitalism in the face of major economic, diplomatic, and military crises throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than give life to yet another nation-centered interpretation of the New Deal, this course invites students to consider both the domestic and international reach of the democratic administration which redefined the American experience by regulating business and agriculture, recalibrating foreign policy, introducing labor protections, and eventually mobilizing the American population for a second world war. But to what extent were certain New Deal policies distinct, national variations of a larger, transnational pattern of adaptive governance? How can the Roosevelt administration’s emphasis on cultural production and identity help us make sense of the New Deal’s ultimate goals? By the end of the course, students will be prepared to weigh in on the current historiographic debates surrounding the New Deal order and present their findings in the form of a final paper.

This course introduces students to the ways in which the New Deal reconciled democracy and capitalism in the face of major economic, diplomatic, and military crises throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, it offers an overview of the development and function of the Federal Art Project (FAP), a federally sponsored cultural program intended to provide employment for struggling artists during the Great Depression. Created as a relief measure to employ artists and artisans to create public murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, and photographs, this initiative remains one of the most understudied New Deal programs created to alleviate economic strain and give form to a sense of national culture. By the end of the semester, students will be prepared to weigh in on the current historiographic debates surrounding the FAP and its cultural legacy. Students will learn to navigate the New Deal-era Index of American Design, explore largescale examples of FAP-sponsored museum and stage design, and take stock of local arts and crafts initiatives launched in the midst of the Depression.

This two-semester course surveys recent scholarly approaches to the “American century,” Henry Luce’s famous 1941 term for U.S. global leadership. In semester one we will focus on the role of the federal government in projecting U.S. power abroad during the twentieth century through diplomatic, military, technological, economic, and cultural means. Semester two explores American interactions with the world from the perspective of non-state actors ranging from tourists and students to businesspeople and philanthropists to artists and activists. We range widely across the historiography of American power, scrutinizing it through the lenses of diplomatic history; cultural history; the history of technology; social history; the histories of gender and sexuality; environmental history; and other approaches.

This course covers the history of the United States and the Cold War in both international and domestic contexts. First, we will examine the Cold War as Washington’s guiding foreign-policy framework for nearly a half-century after World War II, a diplomatic and ideological standoff that fomented hot wars on several continents and economic and cultural policies designed to “win hearts and minds” around the world. Second, we will consider how the Cold War both propelled and constrained changes in American politics, culture, and society. Case studies will include the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, the Cuban Missile Crisis,  the domestic politics of containment, and the impact of U.S.-Soviet tensions on the American civil rights movement.