Let's us search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published since 1690.
Using the American Civil War as a baseline, the course considers what it means to become “modern” by exploring the war’s material and manpower needs, associated key technologies, and how both influenced the United States’ entrance into the age of “Big Business.” Readings include material on steam transportation, telegraphic communications, arms production, naval innovation, food processing, medicine, public health, management methods, and the mass production of everything from underwear to uniforms—all essential ingredients of modernity. Students taking the graduate version must complete additional assignments.
This is a survey of the social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual history of people of African descent in the formation and development of the United States to the Civil War/Reconstruction era up to the present. African American History includes the study of African origins and legacy, trans-Atlantic slave trade, experiences of African Americans during Colonial, Revolutionary, Early National, Antebellum, Civil War/Reconstruction, segregation, disenfranchisement, civil rights, migrations, industrialization, world wars, the Harlem Renaissance, and the conditions of African Americans in the Great Depression, Cold War and post-Cold War eras. This course will enable students to understand African American history as an integral part of U.S. history.
Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We’ll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the “obscene”, as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves.