ENROLL

Serena R Zabin

An enormous variety of people told stories of their lives in early America’s courtrooms. Trials from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are some of the best places for historians to learn about ordinary people and the world in which they lived. Enslaved Africans, pregnant women, wealthy men, and even transgender people were part of early American trials. Sometimes they were there to defend themselves, their lives, and their choices. Others were there as plaintiffs who tried to use the legal system to shape the world around them.  Emphasizing both history and law, this course will be based primarily on trial transcripts and other court papers from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America.

Held for new first year students

Rebecca J Brueckmann

The transition from slavery to freedom; the post-Reconstruction erosion of civil rights and the ascendancy of Booker T. Washington; protest organizations and mass migration before and during World War I; the postwar resurgence of black nationalism; African Americans in the Great Depression and World War II; roots of the modern Civil Rights movement, and black female activism. 

George H Vrtis

Annette R Igra

Rebecca J Brueckmann

This course treats the struggle for racial justice from World War II through the 1960s. Histories, journalism, music, and visual media illustrate black and white elites and grassroots people allied in this momentous epoch that ranges from a southern integrationist vision to northern Black Power militancy. The segregationist response to black freedom completes the study.

Annette R Igra

Was the Progressive Era progressive? It was a period of social reform, labor activism, and woman suffrage, but also of Jim Crow, corporate capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. These are among the topics that can be explored in research papers on this contradictory era. We will begin by reading a brief text that surveys the major subject areas and relevant historiography of the period. The course will center on the writing of a 25-30 page based on primary research, which will be read and critiqued by members of the seminar.