This course focuses on reading transformative texts drawn from the US context. You will read fiction and poetry alongside works of philosophy, history, politics, and sociology that describe, model, and examine the complexities of human experience. This course is designed to "transcend" individual majors, bringing students from across campus into shared conversation, helping you develop and practice skills for success in college, career, and life.

Directed research or writing for qualified students.

Directed research or writing for qualified students.

Not available at this time

Directed reading, research or writing for qualified students.

Directed reading, research or writing for qualified students.

Directed reading, research or writing for qualified students.

This graduate seminar examines key historical events, issues, and people in the nineteenth-century United States. Readings will cover a wide range of topics, including presidential politics and the two-party system; slavery and abolition; citizenship and suffrage; the Second Great Awakening and social reform movements; Indian Removal; westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico War; the Civil War and Reconstruction; and immigration, industrialization, and labor.

Museums, archives, monuments and commemorative events have long contributed to a master narrative in which indigenous peoples die out, disappear, or make room for progress. This seminar will examine past and present examples, and then take a look at how indigenous communities are re-claiming public history spaces at the local, regional and international level.

In this class, students will cover the structure of various types of historical writing, the sorts of research that support a convincing argument, the audiences writing must attract, and the common writing errors that weaken prose. During the semester, students will practice the craft of writing as they spend time with successful writers, develop their own writing projects, and comment on the projects of classmates.