HIST 8645 is also offered in Spring 2025
HIST 8645 is also offered in Spring 2024
Spring 2018 | HIST 8645 Section 001: American Legal History (69060)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- A-F only
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person Term Based
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
UMTC, West Bank
Blegen Hall 220
- Enrollment Status:
Open (7 of 15 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- This course explores the interaction between law, politics, and culture in American society, concentrating on the period from the Revolution through the New Deal. Topics include: democracy and the rule of law; slavery; the public-private distinction; Civil War and Reconstruction; industrialization; expansion of the federal administrative state; law and the human sciences; crime and punishment; legal education and the role of the lawyer in the American polity. Readings will include primary legal sources, such as treatises, statutes, constitutions, and landmark cases, as well as contemporary religious, scientific, and literary works, which will help to situate the legal materials in broader cultural context. Several secondary sources will also be considered, both for insights into the topics covered, and to illustrate various approaches to legal-historical analysis. The course will encourage critical examination of these sources with the aim of clarifying how law has figured in the history and historiography of the United States. No previous background in American history is assumed.
- Class Description:
- Our focus will be on U. S. legal history and particularly the relationship among law, citizenship, and state-building. The course has 3 primary goals: (1) to provide an introduction to the scholarship on citizenship, the state, law, and legal personhood (with attention to questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class); (2) to work on a key professional skill: the art of article writing; and (3) to provide a forum for students to research and write an article-length paper of original scholarship relating to law, legal personhood, citizenship, and state-building. With the final goal in mind, we will begin the course with shared readings with a week or two early on free for research and then leave the final five weeks of the course free for writing.
- Who Should Take This Class?:
- Graduate students interested in U. S. history generally and/or the relationship between law and society, the history of the state, the history of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Although I have designed the course centered in U. S. history, I welcome students from other fields of history and other disciplines and will work with students whose work is not on the U. S. to build a complementary reading list. I would expect the class to appeal to students in History, American Studies, Political Sciences, Journalism and Communication Studies, Sociology, Geography, and Anthropology.
- Learning Objectives:
- See class description above
- Grading:
- A-F
- Exam Format:
- No exams. Students will write weekly response papers early in the term. The focus of a significant portion of the term will be on the students' individual research.
- Class Format:
- Discussion
- Workload:
- In the early weeks of the term we will read a book or collection of articles each week.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/69060/1183
- Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
- 23 October 2017
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2018 History Classes