History 126BAC:
The American West Since 1845
This course surveys the history of the American West since 1845. We will pay particular heed to the history and historiography surrounding those aspects of the West that are typically associated with the region's distinctiveness as both a shifting region on the national map and a potent metaphor in the national imagination. These include: a cultural history propagated in films and literature in which the region occupies center stage in the drama of America's development as a democratic society; an ethnoracial history that consists of a complex, multiracial (as opposed to biracial) pattern of race relations; an environmental history shaped by a scarcity of water amidst an abundance of extractive resources; an urban history characterized by the nation's highest concentration of urbanization by 1970 and an approach to metropolitan development that shaped that of the rest of the nation; and a political history as a national bellwether for both liberal action and conservative reaction. Throughout the course, we will reflect on whether claims about the West's distinctiveness are in fact regionally and analytically distinctive, or whether its time, as some historians have recently declared, to abandon the history of the American West as an historical sub-field.

History 139C / American Studies 101AC:
Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History: Struggles for Racial Equality in Comparative Perspective
"Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History" presents a top-down (political and legal history), bottom-up (social and cultural history), and comparative (by race and ethnicity as well as region) view of America's struggles for racial equality from roughly World War II until the present. Beginning with the onset of World War II, America experienced not a singular, unitary Civil Rights Movement – as is typically portrayed in standard textbook accounts and the collective memory – but rather a variety of contemporaneous civil rights and their related social movements. These movements, moreover, did not follow a tidy chronological-geographic trajectory from South to North to West, nor were their participants merely black and white. Instead, from their inception, America's civil rights movements unfolded both beyond the South and beyond black and white. "Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History" endeavors to equip students with a greater appreciation for the complexity of America's civil rights and social movements history – a complexity that neither a black / white nor nonwhite / white framework adequately captures. Put another way, "Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History" will examine how the problem of the color line – which W.E.B. DuBois deemed to be in 1903 the problem of the twentieth century – might better be viewed as a problem of color lines. If America's demographics are increasingly beyond black and white, if "the classic American dilemma has now become many dilemmas of race and ethnicity," as President Clinton put it in the late 1990s, if color lines now loom as the problem of the 21st century, then a course on America's civil rights and social movements past may very well offer a glimpse into America's civil rights and social movements present and future.

American Studies 110H:
The Meanings of America and the Development of American Studies, 1930s to the Present
This seminar traces the development of the field of American Studies from its origins in the 1930s to the present. Seminal scholarly books in Americans Studies will serve as the principle means to this end. Each of these books has at its core a claim about the "meaning" of America whose substantive contours, methodological approach, and scholarly response we will examine. Over the course of the semester, we will compare, contrast, and evaluate the various "meanings" of America advanced in the books under scrutiny. In the process, we will map the historical trajectory of the only academic field of inquiry that takes America as a whole as its unit of analysis – its pivotal junctures, critical conversations and controversies, and broader sociopolitical contexts within which they emerged.

History 280:
Readings in Racism, Racial Formation, and Racial Liberalism
This seminar examines leading works on racism, racial formation, and racial liberalism in U.S. history from the 17th century through the 20th century. We will consider how "race" has intersected with other social categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as how it has been embedded in the discourses and experiences of law, labor, immigration, the social sciences, and political liberalism. Though the concept of "race" has been scientifically debunked as a means for capturing human biological variation, the practice of racism – premised on a belief in "race" – has been, and remains, a potent sociohistorical force. How has "race" been made real in U.S. history and with what consequences? What efforts have been undertaken to unmake "race" and with what effects? And how can we study the construction and deconstruction of "race" and racism without either reifying "race" or dismissing the sociohistorical force it has exerted in U.S. history? These are some of the central questions that "Readings in Racism, Racial Formation, and Racial Liberalism" proposes to tackle.