ClassInfo

09/03/2019 - 12/11/2019

Tue, Thu 01:00PM - 02:15PM

UMTC, East Bank

Peik Hall 335

AmSt 4101 is designed to introduce students to the discipline of history by examining the human past through the study of gender, sexuality and politics in American history. Specifically, the course will study the ways in which cultural and scientific ideas regarding gender and sexuality have affected the beliefs, practices and relationships that have shaped the American experience over time. The course focuses on historical change within the contexts of the transformations of gender roles and sexual mores from the Colonial era to the present. Through the reading of major scholarly works and exercises in which students analyze primary documents, the course introduces and critically assesses methods and concepts employed by historians of gender and sexuality in producing historical knowledge about major political and cultural transformations in American history. Students use primary sources in order to develop the necessary skills for making meaning out of historical materials and developing their own interpretations. In these exercises they will learn to recognize the value as well as the limitations of particular types of documents and materials. The course challenges students to consider how the questions we ask about the past, and the sources and documents available to scholars, shape our knowledge of American history and the role of gender, sexuality and politics in that history.

Each class session poses a set of historical questions concerning the tensions between individual liberties and the common good as expressed through public policies developed to regulate personal behavior. Several lectures are explicitly historiographic, focusing on the evolution of scholarly knowledge and interpretation of the topic at hand. These lectures are particularly useful in terms of the subject matter of the course, because until recently issues of gender, sexuality and family life were considered to be �private� matters outside the realm of historical scholarship; and the major focus of historical investigation was the public activities of white male elites. During one class session every week, students are given a hands-on experience posing historical questions and analyzing primary sources. Meeting in small groups to discuss the documents, students then write brief papers analyzing the sources. They each write a term drawing on historical documents. Successful completion of this assignment requires posing questions, evaluating evidence, and writing a well-documented interpretation.

The course is organized chronologically with an emphasis on change over time. The first section examines the regulation of sex and reproduction in Colonial America. The next section looks at race and sex in the early Republic, with an emphasis on the institution of slavery, followed by a section on reform and reaction in the last half of the nineteenth century. The course then traces major transformations in the twentieth century through the Progressive Era, the culturally innovative and politically reactionary 1920s, the impact of the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War, and the sexual revolutions and culture wars since the 1960s. Topics include patterns of courtship and dating over time, the construction of heterosexual norms, scientific ideas about sexual deviance and homosexuality and how homosexuals developed relationships and communities over time as definitions of homosexuality changed, issues of reproduction such as unwed pregnancy, eugenics, infertility, reproductive technologies, birth control, and abortion. These topics are covered with attention to the personal and experiential dimensions, as well as public policies, such as anti-miscegenation laws, the Mann Act, compulsory sterilization statutes, regulation of prostitution, laws against contraception and abortion, and sodomy laws.