What is a “life” when it’s written down? How does memory inform the present? Why are autobiographies and memoirs so popular? This course will address these questions among others, considering the relationship between biography, autobiography, and memoir and between personal and social themes. We will examine classic authors such as Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Mark Twain; then more recent examples like Tobias Wolff, Art Spiegelman, Sherman Alexie, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Edwidge Danticat, and Alison Bechdel.

This subject is devoted to reading and discussing basic American historical texts that are often cited but often remain unread, understanding their meaning, and assessing their continuing significance in American culture. Since it is a “Communications Intensive” subject, 21H.105 is also dedicated to improving students’ capacities to write and speak well. It requires a substantial amount of writing, participation in discussions, and individual presentations to the class.

“What then is the American, this new man?” asked J. Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer in 1782. This subject takes Crèvecoeur’s question as the starting point for an examination of the changing meanings of national identity in the American past. We will consider a diverse collection of classic texts in American history to see how Americans have defined themselves and their nation in politics, literature, art, and popular culture. As a communications-intensive subject, students will be expected to engage intensively with the material through frequent oral and written exercises.

This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the “good life” through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.

This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the “good life” through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.

American Encounters provides a narrative of the history of American art that focuses on historical encounters among diverse cultures, upon broad structural transformations such as the rise of the middle classes and the emergence of consumer and mass culture, and on the fluid conversations between "high" art and vernacular expressions. The text emphasizes the intersections among cultures and populations, as well as the exchanges, borrowings, and appropriations that have enriched and vitalized our collective cultural heritage.

This course examines the causes and consequences of American foreign policy since 1898. Course readings cover both substantive and methods topics. Four substantive topics are covered:

major theories of American foreign policy;
major episodes in the history of American foreign policy and historical/interpretive controversies about them;
the evaluation of major past American foreign policies–were their results good or bad? and
current policy controversies, including means of evaluating proposed policies.

Three methods topics are covered:

basic social scientific inference–what are theories? what are good theories? how should theories be framed and tested?
historical investigative methodology, including archival research, and, most importantly,
case study methodology.

Historical episodes covered in the course are used as raw material for case studies, asking “if these episodes were the subject of case studies, how should those studies be performed, and what could be learned from them?”

This course examines the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the United States, from the Civil War to the present. It uses secondary analysis and primary documents, such as court cases, personal accounts, photographs, and films, to examine some of the key issues in the shaping of modern America, including industrialization and urbanization, immigration, the rise of a mass consumer society, the emergence of the US as a global power, and the development of civil rights activism and other major social movements.

This course provides a basic history of American social, economic, and political development from the colonial period through the Civil War. It examines the colonial heritages of Spanish and British America; the American Revolution and its impact; the establishment and growth of the new nation; and the Civil War, its background, character, and impact. Readings include writings of the period by J. Winthrop, T. Paine, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, W. H. Garrison, G. Fitzhugh, H. B. Stowe, and A. Lincoln.

This course provides a basic history of American social, economic, and political development from the colonial period through the Civil War. It examines the colonial heritages of Spanish and British America; the American Revolution and its impact; the establishment and growth of the new nation; and the Civil War, its background, character, and impact. Readings include writings of the period by J. Winthrop, T. Paine, T. Jefferson, J. Madison, W. H. Garrison, G. Fitzhugh, H. B. Stowe, and A. Lincoln.

This course studies the national literature of the United States since the early 19th century. It considers a range of texts - including, novels, essays, and poetry - and their efforts to define the notion of American identity. Readings usually include works by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison.

American Literature 2 is a standard post-Civil-War anthology. Heavily adapted from the Lumen course shell original, the book emphasizes well-integrated literary analysis writing and has several chapters focused on MLA and writing.

This is a open educational resource material for American Literature: Beginnings through 1865 and American Literature: 1865 to present. 

Abstract
American Literature I combines a textbook covering literary analysis and literary critical theory, basic research methods in the humanities, and a chronological reader of diverse selections in American Literature. The book begins with a focus on creation myths and Native American literature. Following this is a significant section on Romanticism. Also included are sections on literary nonfiction, writing about literature, early American and Puritan literature, and Herman Melville.

Description
Prior to my adaptation, this course was created from materials originally developed by the State Board of Community Technical Colleges (SBCTC) of Washington State. American Literature 1 is a modified version of the Lumen American Literature I text. The original version of this book was released under a CC-BY license and is copyright by Lumen Learning. The text is designed to accompany a separate novel such as Moby-Dick and contains supplemental resources for the teaching of American novels of this era. The changes to this book listed are released under a CC-BY-SA license and are copyright by Joshua Dickinson of Jefferson Community College in Watertown, NY.

URI
http://hdl.handle.net/1951/71297

In this class we will practice skills in reading, analyzing, and writing about fiction, poetry and drama from a select sampling of 20th Century American Literature. Through class discussion, close reading, and extensive writing practice, this course seeks to develop critical and analytical skills, preparing students for more advanced academic work.

This work was created as part of the University Libraries’ Open Educational Resources Initiative at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

A web version of this text can be found at https://umsystem.pressbooks.pub/ala1865/.

This book is an anthology of American Literatures After 1865, a new revision of the open educational resource entitled Writing the Nation: A Concise Introduction to American Literature 1865 to Present. It contains works that have been newly introduced to the public domain and provides direct links to reading materials that can be borrowed for free from Archive.org.

This work was created as part of the University Libraries’ Open Educational Resources Initiative at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

A web version of this text can be found at https://umsystem.pressbooks.pub/alpt1865/.

This anthology of American Literatures Prior to 1865, is organized chronologically into four units, focusing on Colonial Literature, Literature of Native American Perspectives and Discovery, Literature of Nineteenth Century Reform, and Literature of the New Nation. It includes introductions to the many authors included to enhance the reader's contextual understanding of the chosen texts. This anthology is essential reading for any student or scholar of Early American literature.

This course explores the metaphorical, historical, social, and psychological value of ghosts in the American novel. Using the theme of “haunting” as a flashpoint for class discussion and a thematic center for our readerly attention, this course examines the American novel in the context of the various histories which might be said to haunt fictional characters in the American novel, to haunt the American novel itself, and ultimately to haunt us: America’s colonial past, its slave past, and other memorable and painful chapters in its past.

In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel's form, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.

This course covers works by major American novelists, beginning with the late 18th century and concluding with a contemporary novelist. The class places major emphasis on reading novels as literary texts, but attention is paid to historical, intellectual, and political contexts as well. The syllabus varies from term to term, but many of the following writers are represented: Rowson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Wharton, James, and Toni Morrison. Previously taught topics include The American Revolution and Makeovers (i.e. adaptations and reinterpretation of novels traditionally considered as American “Classics”). May be repeated for credit with instructor’s permission so long as the content differs.