Spring 2025
Damon Bach: “The Decade of Tumult and Change: America in the 1960s”
This course examines the social, cultural, and political history of the “long 1960s” from its antecedents in the 1950s through the resignation of president Richard Nixon in 1974. The Sixties will be explored from the elite level as well as from the ground up, looking at the experiences of ordinary Americans and grass-roots activists. The class covers pivotal events, leaders, and organizations. It provides significant attention to the Vietnam War and the protest movements that largely defined the era, from Civil Rights to counterculture to Women’s Liberation. These social movements, in turn, led to a substantial backlash by the “Silent Majority.” The modern conservative movement became ascendant. Students study primary and secondary documents, while also learning about the historian’s craft—research, documentation, and writing. Those enrolled will watch two films that exemplify historical themes of the Sixties as well. This intensive writing (W) course requires students to produce an original research paper.
Takkara Brunson: “Visualizing the Black Diaspora”
This course explores how persons of African descent used photography to create identities for themselves as slavery came to an end. Invented in France in 1826, photography emerged as a popular technology among elites living throughout the Americas during the 1840s. Photography became an affordable commodity that individuals from all social classes began to use by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our exploration will identify how artists and scientists have used photographs to reproduce racial stereotypes. We will then examine how Black people challenged these stereotypes by posing for photographs from the period of slave emancipation through the twentieth century. This course takes a comparative approach that looks at African-descended populations in the United States, Cuba, Germany, and Jamaica, among other nations. Students will also develop and revise an original research paper based on primary source materials.
Trent MacNamara: “Popular Morality in U.S. History”
For centuries, questions of right and wrong have brought Americans together, pushed them apart, guided their everyday behavior, and shaped their formal politics. This course begins with a short introduction to major moral debates in U.S. history, focusing on the ideas that most engaged ordinary Americans. Following that introduction, we examine the “craft of history”: how to choose significant and promising research questions, locate primary sources that speak to a question, analyze those sources in light of other historians’ work, and write in clear, elegant prose. The course concludes with students’ production of a work of original scholarship: a 10-13 page essay (at least 2,500 words) that contributes to historical knowledge on popular morality in America.
Justin Randolph: “Prisons and Policing in America”
This course traces the historical development of policing and prisons in the United States. Students learn the historical method while writing a 10–12-page essay based on their original research in primary and secondary sources. Specifically, students will research and write about cultural artifacts from America’s prison regime: music, visual art, memoir, architecture, etc.
Robin Roe: “History of Journalism”
From the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 through the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, people have been riveted by print journalism that sensationalizes human suffering. This same sensationalized journalism has often demonized ethnic, racial, and immigrant groups, trying to reduce readers’ sympathies for victims by deflecting blame onto them or by printing unsubstantiated reports of looting or violence by ethnic, racial, or immigrant groups. Many sensationalized newspaper stories have remained dominant in the collective memory long after proven inaccurate. Seminar participants will learn about the historian’s craft through a public history project. They will examine sensationalism, collective memory, bias, and resistance to bias in print newspaper reports on environmental (including natural) disasters through the 1950s. Those enrolled will learn to evaluate primary and secondary sources, conduct effective primary source research in public digital newspaper archives, write a proposal, and methods of communicating research to the public. Students will be required to learn basic technical skills for effective research, requiring an internet-connected device during class. The final project will be a written analysis supported by primary and secondary sources. This is a writing intensive (W) course and students must pass the writing portion of the course in order to pass the class.
Rebecca Schloss: “Modern French Empire”
In this senior seminar, we will explore the expansion and disintegration of France's Empire over the long- twentieth century (1860s- 1960s), paying particular attention to French colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and Indochina. Throughout the semester, students will read and analyze primary and secondary sources to explore how social, political, and cultural dynamics varied throughout France's overseas possessions during this period. As a final project, students will choose a topic (in consultation with the instructor) related to some aspect of French Empire between 1860-1960, identify relevant primary and secondary sources related to the topic, analyze that evidence, discuss it with others, and write a substantial (15-17 page) research paper based on these sources and conversations.