Courses
Visions/Revisions: Issues in U.S. Women’s History
This seminar surveys path-breaking studies of U.S. women’s history and related subjects, including women’s lives beyond the United States. Course readings, both scholarship and political treatises, exemplify major trends in feminist discourse since the 1960’s, from early challenges to androcentric worldviews to the current stress on differences among women. Class discussions will range from fundamental questions — What is feminism? Is “women” a meaningful category? — to theoretical, interpretive, and methodological debates among women’s historians. The course is designed to help advanced students of women’s history to clarify research interests by assessing the work of their predecessors. M.A. candidates will also use the course to define thesis projects.
Thesis Seminar in Women’s and Gender History
This yearlong course is designed for students who are writing M.A. theses in women’s and gender history. We will discuss the historiographical dimensions of thesis work; assess various research methods, interpretive models, and theories of history; and grapple with practical questions about writing and documentation. Readings include historical scholarship, theoretical works, and research guides. At critical junctures, students will also read and evaluate each others’ work.
Women and the City
Using a variety of sources, both historical (primary and secondary) and from popular culture (literature, film, art, music), we will examine the relationship between women and American cities from the colonial era to the present. How have women negotiated for power in cities? What roles have they played in shaping how cities developed and operated in public and private spheres, and on social, political, economic, and cultural fronts? Have women been merely pawns of patriarchal urban machines or powerful participants in the development of urban landscapes or something else? What brings/brought women together and pulls them apart? These are only some of the questions that we will address as we examine the place of women from many backgrounds throughout urban American history. There will be one field trip into New York City required per semester to look at the built environment and its relationship to what will be discussed in class.
Gender and Nationalism(s)
Nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called on to produce a sense of self and collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to minorities and socially/politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same positions, e.g., issues of cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How does the insider/outsider relationship alter in different periods and conceptualizations? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women’s sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.
Public Stories, Private Lives: Methods of Oral History
Oral history methodology has moved from a contested approach to studying history to an integral method of learning about the past. This is because oral histories allow us to gain an understanding of past events from a diverse array of vantage points. Methods of recording oral history also allow the possibility of bringing private stories into the public. In contrast, public history in the form of monuments, museums, and World Heritage Sites are consciously preserved in order to emphasize particular aspects of a national, regional, or local past, which its protectors deem to be important. Who owns this history? Is it Civil War reenactors who dedicate their weekends to remembering this war? Is it the African Americans who return to West Africa in search of their African past or the West Africans who want to forget about their slave trading past? What happens when the methods for interpreting public and oral histories combine? This course places particular attention on the importance of oral history in tracing memories of the past. We will discuss how Africanist and feminist scholars have used oral history to study the history of underrepresented groups. We will also investigate how methods of oral history and public history can be used in reconstructing the local history of our surrounding community (Yonkers, Bronxville, Westchester).
Leisure and Danger
The interaction between work and play has taken various forms in history. Our project in this course will be to examine the changes and continuities in the idea of leisure. Beginning in early modern Europe, we will trace the concept up to the present, concentrating on Europe and America, and reflecting on such subjects as travel and the pursuit of the exotic, theatricality, consumerism, luxury, and display. In the nineteenth century, leisure became democratized and an anxious debate grew louder. What were the implications of making leisure available to masses of people? From romance novels to cheap liquor, from shopping to the cinema, new avenues of leisure aroused both fear and excitement. Moralists felt a need to police both public and private space and to reassert the primacy of work, thrift, and duty. We will study them and the various forms of accommodations and resistance that met their efforts. Class, ethnicity, gender, and geography all acted to structure people’s access to leisure. We will look at struggles over race, gender, and popular culture; the way certain groups became designated as providers of entertainment; or how certain locations were created as places of pleasure. To set the terms of the debate, we will begin with some eighteenth-century readings about the theatre and the market, the salon and the court. Readings will include work of Montesquieu, Flaubert, Wilde, Wharton, George Eliot, and Fitzgerald. In addition, we will read works of nonfiction that show how leisure helped to create new forms of subjectivity and interiority. Students will be encouraged to work on conference topics linking leisure to a variety of subjects, such as childhood and education, or the construction of racial identities, or the changing nature of parenthood as birth control became more and more widely available, to name just a few areas. Potentially this course, through the study of complex oppositions like need and desire, purpose and aimlessness, the necessary and gratuitous, can give us a sense of the dizzying questions about life’s very meaning that present themselves when we aim at a life of leisure.
Rethinking the Racial Politics of the New Deal and Cold War Citizenship, Public Policy, and Social Welfare
Was the New Deal a major turning point in American history? The New Deal transformed the meaning of American citizenship. It introduced universal social welfare as an essential component of “social citizenship.” American citizenship was enriched from simple voting rights to social welfare rights that entitled citizens to a vast safety net of social programs from Social Security to the GI Bill. Programs such as the GI Bill had dramatic educational, cultural, and economic consequences as well. The GI Bill dramatically enlarged the American middle class, transforming millions of urban workers into college-educated suburban professionals and businesspeople. However, today scholars are debating the meaning and substance of the “universality” of those programs. They have questioned to what extent was that social citizenship “raced” and “gendered.” Did the New Deal trigger “identity politics” by excluding some women, African Americans, and Latinos from its new rights and economic bounty? Some scholars suggest that the New Deal programs that propelled some “white” groups into the middle-class plunged “nonwhite” groups into the underclass. This course explores the wealth of political, social, cultural, psychological, and economic issues at the heart of that rich debate. The seminar will draw on comparative history, looking not only at different ethnic groups but also exploring differences of “race and nation” between the United States, Germany, South Africa, and Brazil. In the United States, we will pay special attention to the impact those political and policy dynamics had on the “racial formation” of “white,” “black,” “Chicano,” and “Nuyorican” identities between the New Deal and the cold war and on the trajectory of American politics up to the 2008 elections.