This course is an introduction to interdisciplinary considerations of American culture. Specific topics may change from year to year and may include questions of national consensus versus native, immigrant and racial subcultures and countercultures; industrialization and the struggles over labor; the rise of leisure; the transformation of (the frequently gendered) public and private spheres; the relationship between politics and culture; the development and distinctions among consumer culture, mass culture and popular culture. These themes will be examined through a variety of media, such as literature, historical writing, music, art, film, architecture, etc. The course will also give attention to the many methods through which scholars have, over time, developed the discipline of American Studies.

Full details for AMST 1101 - Introduction to American Studies

A policy-centered approach to the study of government in the American experience. Considers the American Founding and how it influenced the structure of government; how national institutions operate in shaping law and public policy; who has a voice in American politics and why some are more influential than others; and how existing public policies themselves influence social, economic, and political power. Students will gain an introductory knowledge of the founding principles and structure of American government, political institutions, political processes, political behavior, and public policy. (GOVT-AM)

Full details for AMST 1115 - Introduction to American Government and Politics

Introduces students to the sociological analysis of American society through the lens of film. Major themes involve race, class, and gender; upward and downward mobility; incorporation and exclusion; small town vs the big city; and cultural conflicts over individualism, achievement, and community. We match a range of movies like American Graffiti (Lucas), Ace in the Hole (Wilder), The Asphalt Jungle (Houston), Do the Right Thing (Lee), The Heiress (Wyler), High Noon (Zinnemann), Mean Streets (Scorsese), Nashville (Altman), The Philadelphia Story (Cukor), and A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan). Each film is paired with social scientific research that examines parallel topics, such as analyses of who goes to college, the production of news, deviant careers, urban riots, the gendered presentation of self, and the prisoner's dilemma.

Full details for AMST 1290 - American Society through Film

(Intro) To Black Music will introduce students to a multitude of Black musical artists across a range of styles and genres - from the blues of Bessie Smith and Blind Lemon Jefferson to the contemporary stylistic experimentation of Doechii, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyonc? as well as to writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Ralph Ellison who help us better understand the sound and significance of their performances. Students will be expected to engage the dynamic innovation, cultural development, and deep attunements ever-active in the rhythms and melodies of Black social life through critical listening and analysis. In doing so this class will broaden students? musical and cultural horizons and help students situate Black diasporic music making in the 20th and 21st centuries within a broader context of racial capitalism, commodification, global networks of exchange, and the artistic pathways forged from legacies of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and resistance. (MUSIC-HC)

Full details for AMST 1332 - (Intro) To Black Music: Listening, Sounding, and Studying Black Radical Possibility

At the inception of this department at Cornell University in 1969, the Africana Studies and Research Center became the birthplace of the field Africana studies. Africana studies emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary studies of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. In this course, we will look at the diverse contours of the discipline. We will explore contexts ranging from modernity and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex in the New World to processes of decolonization and globalization in the contemporary digital age. This course offers an introduction to the study of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. This course will examine, through a range of disciplines, among them literature, history, politics, philosophy, the themes - including race/racism, the Middle Passage, sexuality, colonialism, and culture - that have dominated Africana Studies since its inception in the late-1960s. We will explore these issues in an attempt to understand how black lives have been shaped in a historical sense; and, of course, the effects of these issues in the contemporary moment. This course seeks to introduce these themes, investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.

Full details for AMST 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

Focusing on political and social history, this course surveys African-American history from Emancipation to the present. The class examines the post-Reconstruction Nadir of black life; the mass black insurgency against structural racism before and after World War II; and the Post-Reform Age that arose in the wake of the dismantling of legal segregation. The course will familiarize students with the basic themes of African-American life and experience and equip them to grasp concepts of political economy; class formation; and the intersection of race, class and gender. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 1595 - African American History from 1865

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.

Full details for AMST 1600 - Indigenous North America

This lecture course combines historical and literary approaches to explore the inner life of Americans over the last two hundred years. No prior knowledge of US history is assumed. We'll examine the ways in which historical context can shape literary works and the ways in which literature, in turn, can shape history. How have Americans imagined themselves and their nation? Has there ever been a stable American identity? The focus will be on literary works that pose questions about race, gender, individualism, and belonging, allowing us to see how writers have both reinforced and resisted cultural pressures. My hope is that tracing US history through works of the imagination will help in the collective (and perpetual) effort to reimagine American life. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 1770 - U.S. History through Literature

On the eve of the American Revolution Britain administered 26 colonies-not just the 13 that would become the United States. British North America's dramatic struggle for independence has led many history textbooks to read the revolution back into colonial history, focusing on those 13 North American colonies that would become the United States, often at the expense of global connections that defined the colonial and revolutionary periods. As this class will explore, key elements of early American history can only be understood through a broader perspective, from the economic growth of New England as a result of the African slave trade and exchange in the Caribbean, to the use of citizenship as a category of exclusion in response to the myriad inhabitants-European, Indigenous, and African-who neighbored or lived within the original 13 colonies. In this course, we will explore the history of early America from the 1490s through the 1800s from a global perspective. Voices usually peripheral to the narrative of American development, from enslaved African mariners to Spanish American nuns, will become central to processes of cultural encounter, labor exploitation, revolutionary upheavals, and state formation that shaped the making and unmaking early America. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for AMST 1985 - American History from 1500 to 1800

This course centers Black women who have often described their reproductive health experiences as fighting for our lives. While grounded in an exploration of Black women 's experiences in the US, this course also looks across the diaspora to issues of access, rights, and equity in reproductive health. Deeply inspired by the field of Black Feminist Health Science Studies, a field that advocates for the centrality of activism in healthcare and its importance for Black women's overall health and well-being, this course examines how issues of gender, race, class, ability, and power intersect to inform how reproductive health is conceptualized, practiced, and experienced. Ultimately, this course will yield a deeper understanding of how Black women have transformed existential and literal threats on their lives into a robust terrain of community-based activism and a movement for reproductive justice. We will read across a range of texts and genres from the historical and theoretical, to memoir and documentary. With what we learn together, we will craft contributions to public debates around healthcare issues impacting Black women. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2023 - Fighting for Our Lives: Black Women's Reproductive Health and Activism in Historical Perspective

This course explores the history of religions among people of African descent from the period of the development of the transatlantic slave trade (1440s) to the present. Its aim is to introduce students to the complex ways religion has shaped their lifeworlds. Such study involves, among other things, encounters with the religious cultures of slaves and slaveholders in the antebellum South; the development of independent Black churches, the effects of emancipation, migration, and urbanization upon Black religious life; new black religious movements (e.g., Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, Black Hebrews); the emergence of Black secularism/humanism; the impact of Black religious expressive culture (e.g., music, sermon, song, and film); the religious dimensions of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; as well as contemporary developments and transformations in Black religious life. All of which requires attentiveness to how we tell the story of Africana religions, and how scholars have developed and pursued the modern study of Africana religion.

Full details for AMST 2055 - Introduction to Africana Religions

Social Problems in the U.S. teaches students how to think like a social scientist when encountering claims about major contemporary issues. Through readings and assignments, students develop an analytical toolkit for evaluating the scope, causes, consequences, and proposed solutions to a wide range of complicated social problems, such as: childhood poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, job insecurity, family instability, discrimination by sexual identity, unequal pay for women's work, gender imbalances in family life, health disparities, food insecurity, drug abuse, and educational inequality. Rather than cover all of these (and other) social problems in depth, the course emphasizes a conceptual framework that can be applied broadly. The semester culminates with a written proposal examining a social problem and developing an approach to address it with public policy.

Full details for AMST 2070 - Social Problems in the United States

Full details for AMST 2146 - Health and Fitness Culture

This seminar will explore some of the major political and cultural trends in the United States, from the era of the Democratic New Dealer, Franklin D. Roosevelt, through the era of the conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan? This seminar will explore through primary source research and secondary readings the key economic, political, and cultural characteristics and transformations of the period from 1930 though the turn of the century. The course will examine the rise, persistence, and breakdown of the so-called New Deal Order and the crucial political shifts that we call the Reagan Revolution. A key theme in this course will be the transformations and critiques of American liberalism and conservatism. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2220 - From the New Deal to the Age of Reagan

In recent years, poverty and inequality have become increasingly common topics of public debate, as academics, journalists, and politicians attempt to come to terms with growing income inequality, with the increasing visibility of inter-country differences in wealth and income, and with the persistence of racial, ethnic, and gender stratification. This course introduces students to ongoing social scientific debates about the sources and consequences of inequality, as well as the types of public policy that might appropriately be pursued to reduce (or increase) inequality. These topics will be addressed in related units, some of which include guest lectures by faculty from other universities (funded by the Center for the Study of Inequality). Each unit culminates with a highly spirited class discussion and debate.

Full details for AMST 2225 - Controversies About Inequality

Americans are conflicted about immigration. We celebrate and commercialize our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments ?Today?s immigrants are too different. They don?t want to assimilate? or ?My grandparents learned English quickly, why can?t they?? The assumption is that the immigrant ancestors adapted quickly but that today?s immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to ?become Americans?? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today?s immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives

This course examines K-12 and higher education in the United States through a sociological lens. To accomplish this, we examine how schools and schooling relate to broader social structures and institutions, including neighborhoods, families, and the legal system. Throughout the course we will explore theoretical perspectives and empirical findings that grapple with educational institutions as both engines of social mobility and reflections of societal inequality. Throughout the course, students will learn how sociological frameworks intersect with education policy and will be encouraged to engage with their own educational biographies. Students will investigate a topic of their choice in the sociology of education for the final project.

Full details for AMST 2256 - Schooling and Society

The course reviews the great debates on capitalist economic growth to shed light on the current epochal transformation of the global economy. Can capitalism survive? Can socialism work? The debate continues. Why and how has American capitalism shaped the emergence of dynamic capitalism in China? What enables and guides the emergence of a global high-technology knowledge economy in the 21st century? What is the relationship between capitalism as an economic order and democracy?

Full details for AMST 2280 - Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

This class will explore how access to the outdoors has been impacted by social inequalities related to race, class, and gender throughout U.S. history. The idea of ?the outdoors? and its synonyms (whether ?wilderness? or ?nature?) has sustained lasting cultural resonance in the United States. Since the nineteenth century?s development of American Romanticism, ?nature??or the idea of a landscape not manipulated by humans?has become a powerful cultural symbol and one of the nation?s most cherished attributes. However, this course will examine how this strong reverence for natural places in the United States has been overlaid by racist ideologies. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2369 - Race, the Nation, & American Outdoor Recreation

This course engages the rich cartographic record of colonial North America via an in-depth analysis of two dozen iconic maps. Integrating visual and textual analysis, students will assess human representations of space across cultural boundaries, explore change over time in the mapmaking practices of indigenous peoples and various European intruders, and study the evolving relationship between cartography and power, attending particularly to the process by which mapping promoted a revolutionary new understanding of American geography as composed of the bounded territories of nation-states. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for AMST 2391 - From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States: Early American History in Two Dozen Maps

Movements and activism are important sites of learning and creativity. As people organize, they experiment with new ways of relating to the world and educating one another. Anthropologists have examined movements as cultural practice, focusing on how people create meanings, develop identities, and generate knowledge. In this course, students will study contemporary activism in the US concerning issues such as race, the environment, food, housing, and migration. We ask: What knowledge(s) and ways of learning emerge within movements? In what ways does this learning support or undermine learning for democracy? How do collectives teach and learn “justice" and what futures do they enact in the present? Students will complete projects that allow them to learn from the local community.

Full details for AMST 2425 - Learning in Social Movement

This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution, as well as engaging the enduring significance of its memory in contemporary American life - why do we choose to remember the American Revolution in ways that occlude its divisive and bloody events? This course explores many of the key themes of this critical period of American history: the rise of colonial opposition to Great Britain, the nature of the Revolutionary Wars, and the domestic republican experiment that followed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The course emphasizes student interpretations with an eye toward analyzing the comparative experiences of women and men, everyday people and famous leaders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and those who opposed the Revolution. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for AMST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

This course offers a survey of American political thought from the colonial period to the present. We will read Puritan sermons, revolutionary pamphlets, philosophical treatises, presidential orations, slave narratives, prison writings, and other classic texts, in order to understand the ideas and debates that have shaped American politics. Topics to be discussed will include the meaning of freedom, the relationship between natural rights and constitutional authority, the idea of popular sovereignty, theories of representation and state power, race and national identity, problems of inequality, and the place of religion in public life. Lectures will be organized around both historical context and close reading of primary texts. (GOVT-PT, HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2669 - American Political Thought

The Cold War is often framed as a historical conflict between two competing geopolitical blocs, but it impacted the lives of many people throughout the world. This class explores how literature and culture shaped and was shaped by the Cold War, in American and some non-American contexts. How did Cold War cultures interact with state funding, the development of new sciences and technologies, and weaponized ideology? How did writers, intellectuals, artists, and activists -- state-sponsored and/or dissident -- navigate Cold War pressures and divides? We will begin with Hiroshima and the several forms of American anticommunism, and proceed from containment culture to countercultures, decolonization movements, and the environmental movement. Topics of study may include intelligence (espionage), advertising (publicity), civil rights, and the public questioning of gender roles. We will also engage with films, music, and painting, and possibly more recent works and new media. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 2675 - Cultures of the Cold War

Roots of the United States' most vexing problems can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. This class explores the struggles to explain these turbulent decades in both popular memory and historical scholarship and the consequences of our interpretations for understanding today. Students will use movies and oral history to investigate the role of perspective, framing, and agency in historical analysis. We will examine the era's struggles over issues such as racial hierarchy, gender roles, abortion, climate change, economic inequality, war, drugs, crime, and democracy. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2682 - Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America

This course surveys global and American black art and visuality from the 18th century to the present and introduces its major figures, movements, criticisms and social, political, and economic issues. We begin with an overview of African art and global structures of slavery and colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries to ask how racial blackness structures the way the modern world has been imagined and visualized, as well as how black people created art that resisted and challenged a modern mode of visuality that excluded and negated them. We then focus primarily on black art made in the 20th and 21st centuries, with emphasis on painting, sculpture, crafts, performance, photography, film, and new media in order to understand how black artists respond to and shape their social and political realities. This course examines the role that art can play in politically turbulent times and centers black artists as important critics of an antiblack world and visionaries of new life possibilities. We will use an interdisciplinary lens to understand the diverse output of black artists including the fields of art history, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, and technology and new media studies. Some classes will be held in the Johnson Museum and Olin Library to work directly with visual objects and artworks.

Full details for AMST 2700 - Introduction to Black Art

From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, movies - and in particular Hollywood - have profoundly influenced the ways in which people see, think and talk about the world. Focusing mostly on Hollywood film, this course introduces the study of American cinema from multiple perspectives: as an economy and mode of production; as an art form that produces particular aesthetic styles; as a cultural institution that comments on contemporary issues and allows people to socialize. We will consider the rise of Hollywood in the age of mass production; the star system; the introduction of sound and the function of the soundtrack; Hollywood's rivalry with television; censorship; the rise of independent film, etc. Weekly screenings introduce major American genres (e.g. science fiction, film noir, the musical) and directors (e.g. Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino). (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 2760 - American Cinema

In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate social, cultural, and political history in the United States, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts-monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 2792 - Monuments, Museums, and Memory: An Introduction to Public History

Climate policy is one of the most important and contentious areas of politics in the US today. In this course we will consider climate change in the United States, identifying how political institutions, everyday people, and the physical environment come together to affect climate policy. This course will consider climate policy at the local and federal level, as well as examine how the US participates in international climate agreements. Students will critically analyze contemporary US climate policy; develop and addresses pertinent research questions; and learn how to conduct and communicate policy-relevant research. (GOVT-AM)

Full details for AMST 3061 - Climate Politics in the US

The archaeology of European settler colonialism is a fast growing and increasingly important field of both world history and anthropological archaeology. Drawing upon insights provided by a relatively long period of Historical Archaeological research, scholars are increasingly attempting to understand the origins and effects of European colonialism on a global scale. In this course we will explore the dominant themes in global Historical Archaeology. We will explore how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of the origins and nature of European colonialism and capitalism, as well as the mutual interactions among Europeans, Indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants. (ARKEO-TM)

Full details for AMST 3200 - Historical Archaeology: A Global Perspective

This course investigates the United States Supreme Court and its role in politics and government. It traces the development of constitutional doctrine, the growth of the Court's institutional power, and the Court's interaction with Congress, the president, and society. Discussed are major constitutional law decisions, their political contexts, and the social and behavioral factors that affect judges, justices, and federal court jurisprudence.

Full details for AMST 3281 - Constitutional Politics

Based on indigenous and place-based ways of knowing, this course (1) presents a theoretical and humanistic framework from which to understand generation of ecological knowledge; (2) examines processes by which to engage indigenous and place-based knowledge of natural resources, the nonhuman environment, and human-environment interactions; and (3) reflects upon the relevance of this knowledge to climatic change, resource extraction, food sovereignty, medicinal plant biodiversity, and issues of sustainability and conservation. The fundamental premise of this course is that human beings are embedded in their ecological systems.

Full details for AMST 3330 - Ways of Knowing: Indigenous and Place-Based Ecological Knowledge

The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.

Full details for AMST 3334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates

Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST, PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 3360 - American Theatre Stage and Screen I

A survey of the turning point of US. history: The Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, Reconstruction (1865-1877). We will look at the causes, the coming, and the conduct, of the war, and the way in which it became a war for freedom. We will then follow the cause of freedom through the greatest slave rebellion in American history, and the attempts by formerly enslaved people to make freedom real in Reconstruction. And we will see how Reconstruction's tragic ending left questions open that are still not answered in U.S. society and politics. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 3430 - History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

This course offers an opportunity to read in depth two major writers of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Friends and one-time collaborators in the New York City of the 1920s, each had important careers that extended long after the Harlem Renaissance period in which they achieved early renown. This class surveys the myriad genres in which each writer worked (short stories, poetry, novels, drama, critical essays, folklore and anthropology). And it will also consider the literary, cultural, and political contexts in which their work was first read, as well as how that work was received, forgotten, recovered, contested, and emulated. The class concludes by examining reading subsequent major authors (Toni Morrison, Harryette Mullen) who drew directly upon Hughes' and Hurston's legacies. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 3503 - Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes

This course explores the history, theory, and craft of writing for film, television, and other narrative media (including documentary, reality television, interactive media, etc.). We consider the vital elements of storytelling along with structural principles, evolving industrial pressures and practices, and emerging non-linear ideas, with a regular line of up of screenings, guest speakers and practicing writers. This course includes both analytic and creative-writing assignments. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 3533 - Screen and Story: Script Analysis

This course is open to experienced rappers, beatmakers, and vocalists interested forging collaborative relationships with other students. Taking as a foundation hip-hop's relationship to social justice, each semester we will work together to plan and record an EP on a theme or keyword chosen as a group. We will construct and analyze playlists of inspirational material, identifying specific hip-hop compositional strategies for creating beats and rhymes on a theme, and will use these tools to create and workshop our own collaborative tracks in weekly meetings. (MUSIC-PL)

Full details for AMST 3617 - Cornell Hip-Hop Collective

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy? (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 3625 - Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper

Foreign in a domestic sense is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called Insular Cases of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 3679 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Full details for AMST 3703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon defines parody broadly as repetition with critical difference, which marks difference rather than similarity. Taking a cue from Hutcheon, we will consider parody as a form of meaning making that is not necessarily used in the service of ridicule. Rather, we will examine a number of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century imitative works in order to distinguish the rich variety of political agendas and aesthetic rationales for recent parody. An emphasis on postmodern or contemporary performances and media that renovate images, ideas, and icons from modernism and modernity will unite our otherwise diverse efforts. Some of these efforts will also highlight what happens when an artist takes up a work made for one platform (for example, theatre, performance art, installation, cinema, television, the Web) and parodies it in another. Creators and works under consideration may range from Christopher Durang, Split Britches, and Pig Iron Theatre Company to The Simpsons, Cookie's Fortune, and Strindberg and Helium. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 3745 - Parody

In this course, we will critically examine the production and performance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender through literature and contemporary performance genres such as spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theatre. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 3754 - Spoken Word, Hip-Hop Theater, and the Politics of Performance

In this course, we will answer two major questions: What is Latino history? And how should we write Latino History? We will explore these questions without attempting to cover all of Latino history before 1800. We will focus on a variety of experiences to better understand how differences in race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and class have shaped Latino communities over time. We will read academic journal articles and books (secondary sources) and documents from the past, such as diaries, letters, court records, and maps (primary sources). Throughout the semester we will be working in groups toward creating a final project: a Latino history website. (HIST-HNA, HIST-HPE)

Full details for AMST 3775 - Latinos and the United States, 1492-1880

This introductory course introduces students to issues and debates related to international migration and will provide an interdisciplinary foundation to understanding the factors that shape migration flows and migrant experiences. We will start by reviewing theories of the state and historical examples of immigrant racialization and exclusion in the United States and beyond. We will critically examine the notions of borders, citizenship/non-citizenship, and the creation of diasporas. Students will also hear a range of perspectives by exposing them to Cornell guest faculty who do research and teach on migration across different disciplines and methodologies and in different world areas. Examples include demographic researchers concerned with immigrant inequality and family formation, geographic perspectives on the changing landscapes of immigrant metropolises, legal scholarship on the rights of immigrant workers, and the study of immigrant culture from a feminist studies lens. Offered each fall semester.

Full details for AMST 3800 - Migration: Histories, Controversies, and Perspectives

Is the welfare state a protector from capitalism or an accomplice to capitalism? Social safety nets and capitalist markets have a complicated relationship for workers. Healthcare, retirement pensions, unemployment insurance –these provisions protect workers from the risks of getting sick, old, and fired. These same provisions are also tremendous sources of capital, invested into the very employers and asset-managers who pose risks to workers. This contradiction is not an "American thing," but extends to social democracies like the Netherlands who steward one of the largest national capital-funded pensions. This course uncovers these complexities of the welfare state, with special theoretical and empirical attention to labor. Geographically it will focus on the United States, with frequent international comparisons to examine the commonalities and differences of welfare states. And lastly, it will be equal parts sociology and history, illuminating the origins, transformations, and inequalities of the welfare state in the United States.

Full details for AMST 3815 - The Welfare State and Its Contradictions for Workers

This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal-that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 3831 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History

One hundred and fifty years ago, most of the world’s Jews lived in Europe or the Ottoman Empire. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century the United States was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Using the tools of social, cultural, and intellectual history, this course examines the lives of Jews in America from 1654 through the present, exploring how they adapted to life in the United States and how the United States adapted itself to the presence of Jews.

Full details for AMST 3865 - American Jewish History, 1654-Present

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect-in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked-from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 3885 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

Affords opportunities for students to carry out independent research under appropriate supervision. Each student is expected to review pertinent literature, prepare a project outline, conduct the research, and prepare a report. Topic and credit hours TBD as arranged between faculty and student.

Full details for AMST 3980 - Independent Research

Individualized readings for junior and senior students. Topics, requirements, and credit hours will be determined in consultation between the student and the supervising faculty member.

Full details for AMST 3990 - Readings in American Studies

This course focuses on three major and interrelated themes within Filipino/Filipino American history: war/empire, labor/migration, and culture/imaginaries. How do we account for the overwhelming number of Filipinos in nursing, domestic work, and the U.S. military? How do filmmakers, visual/theatre artists, and writers continue to remember the oft-forgotten history of U.S.-Philippine relations? In what ways have diasporic and immigrant Filipinos as well as Filipino Americans created their own culture as well as engaged with their counterparts in the Philippines? By reading historical and sociological texts alongside popular cultural texts and artistic examples, this course considers the politics of history, memory, and cultural citizenship in Filipino America. (ASIAN-SC)

Full details for AMST 4052 - Critical Filipino and Filipino American Studies

Artificial intelligence (AI), computers, and digital technologies including robotics, machine learning, large language models (LLMs), internet-enabled platforms, and other “high-tech” drivers of automation have revolutionized the nature and organization of work in the U.S., with material implications for workers and their families, among others. This upper-level course begins with a rhetorical inquiry into whether and when the technological change engendered by digitization, information technology, and AI benefits workers. We then consider the broader impact of recent technological advances on manufacturing and fabrication, low- and semi-skilled service work, i.e., restaurant servers and bus drivers, and even on expert and professional work like that to which most of you presumably aspire. Among the central themes is the notion that technology does not unilaterally act upon workers, their employers, or society-at-large. Rather, workers, managers, customers, institutions, and policymakers shape which advances take hold and which do not, the ways that these technologies are deployed in the workplace, and the ways that society can actively mitigate the costs to technological advancement while harnessing its benefits.

Full details for AMST 4066 - Technological Change at Work

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of ?police brutality? and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 4109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

This advanced seminar traces transformations in citizenship and the franchise throughout U.S. history. Through readings, frequent short writings, discussion, and a final paper, the class examines the struggles over who can claim full citizenship and legitimate voice in the political community. It examines the divergent, often clashing, visions of legitimate democratic rule, focusing particularly on the debates over who should vote and on what terms. We examine the dynamics that have shaped the boundaries of citizenship and hierarchies within it, paying attention to changes in the civic status of Native Americans, property-less white men, paupers, women, African Americans, various immigrant groups, residents of U.S. colonies, felons, and people with intellectual disabilities. A significant portion of the class focuses on debates about U.S. democracy in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 4203 - Contesting Votes: Democracy and Citizenship Throughout U.S. History

Environmental Justice is a relatively recent term, coined in the United States in the 1980s. It usually refers to a social movement fighting against the unfair concentration of toxic sites within impoverished communities of color. As a broader set of ideas, though, environmental justice has a much longer history, going back at least to the 17th century in England, when poor farmers banded together to prevent common land from being enclosed for the exclusive use of the aristocracy. This course explores that deep history, examining various overlaps between environmental thought and theories of social justice over the past 400 years in the western world. It concludes with an examination of the current climate justice movement and a consideration of how environmental justice concerns are being played out in recent works of speculative fiction. What do we owe to the climate refugees of our present day? What do we owe to future generations? (HIST-HNA)

Full details for AMST 4262 - Environmental Justice: Past, Present, Future

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. (ARKEO-TM)

Full details for AMST 4272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

This course examines the politics of technology since 1960 with a focus on the United States. Each week we will watch a significant feature film from the period that addresses an issue in the politics of technology. Readings from Science & Technology Studies (STS) will set the films in historical context and raise theoretical and normative questions. The films will include narrative features, such as dramas and satires, as well as documentaries. Topics of films and readings will include nuclear war, human enhancement, biosecurity, financial engineering, surveillance and privacy, toxic chemical exposures, artificial intelligence, genomic medicine, and political campaign technology. These issues will be explored individually and through comparative analysis. Written work and discussion will link films and readings to broader questions about how political issues involving technology have been represented on film and in public discourse; and about democratic decision making in a high-tech society.

Full details for AMST 4292 - Politics and Technology Since 1960

This seminar explores one of the most consequential movements in African American cultural history, a movement of transnational impact. It was empowered in part by new social and institutional developments, including the Great Migration of African Americans, immigration from the Caribbean, and Pan-African contacts in Paris. It also benefited from new pluralistic theories of American culture and developments in the publishing industry centered in Manhattan. African American cultural vitality surged in the context of modern mobility and the rise of new publishing enterprises and technologies of sound reproduction. While chiefly centered on literature, the seminar will also touch on visual art, music, and performance. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 4506 - The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the love trilogy on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre. (ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 4519 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This class examines the centrality of audiotape to the aesthetic and political cultures of the late Cold War period. After writing On the Road in the mid-1950s, Jack Kerouac spent twenty years writing a novel that tried, in part, to emulate in literary writing the properties and capacities of tape recording. By the time Visions of Cody was finally published in 1972, audiotape had become an aesthetic medium in its own right, its capacity for editing inspiring revolutions in music, art, and writing. From its very inception, however, it was also an instrument of political communication and surveillance. With an eye to the state and another to the field of music, this class will focus on the way literary writing responded to and incorporated the new technology. (ENGL-PST)

Full details for AMST 4619 - Writing on Tape in the 60s, 70s, 80s: Art and Politics of the Overdub

This course will explore the cultural, political and social ramifications of stand-up comedy through the lens of twentieth and twenty-first century stand up comedians. Because of streaming services, Stand Up is more accessible than ever to a wider audience. Too, streamed video is not subject to the censorship rules of broadcast television so the wider array of subject matter and the way that subject can be presented is direct and fearless, making comics not just entertainers, but cultural influencers in a much broader way that earlier cultural critics, such as Lenny Bruce and Moms Mabley could only imagine. This newfound influence makes Stand Up comedians and their comedy ripe for study, not only within a cultural context but also as a part of free-speech arguments. (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 4672 - Funny Business: Stand Up Comedy and Its Social, Political, and Cultural Importance

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes queer and trans in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA). (PMA-HTC)

Full details for AMST 4695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).

Full details for AMST 4774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality

To graduate with honors, AMST majors must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of an AMST faculty member and defend that thesis orally before a committee. Students interested in the honors program should consult the AMST Director of Undergraduate Study during the junior year and submit an honors application by May 1 of the junior year.

Full details for AMST 4993 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

This course will offer students the opportunity to both study and shape the ways in which US public culture attempts to both remember and forget some of the most contentious aspects of US history topics: the role of the police over time, and the way charges of “police brutality” and violence have organized US history and shaped how we remember (or forget) it. Radicalized slavery, Black resistance to it, and the legacy of both. And additional topics.

Full details for AMST 6109 - Public History, Theory & Practice

The archaeology of European settler colonialism is a fast growing and increasingly important field of both world history and anthropological archaeology. Drawing upon insights provided by a relatively long period of Historical Archaeological research, scholars are increasingly attempting to understand the origins and effects of European colonialism on a global scale. In this course we will explore the dominant themes in global Historical Archaeology. We will explore how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of the origins and nature of European colonialism and capitalism, as well as the mutual interactions among Europeans, Indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants. (ARKEO-TM)

Full details for AMST 6210 - Historical Archaeology: A Global Perspective

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models. We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. (ARKEO-TM)

Full details for AMST 6272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

This seminar explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Black Power Movement, broadly defined. Beginning with an examination of transnationalism in the early 20th century, it examines the thought and political activities of African-American intellectuals and activists who crossed national boundaries, figuratively and literally, in the quest for black freedom. We will focus on the postwar era, particularly the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring transnationalism in the context of black feminism, Marxism, black nationalism, Pan Africanism, and other political traditions. We will examine the meeting and mingling of transnational discourses, ideologies, and activists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Full details for AMST 6321 - Black Power Movement and Transnationalism

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes queer and trans in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA).

Full details for AMST 6695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Full details for AMST 6703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of more than human relations. Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits (TBD).

Full details for AMST 6774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality