American Studies Courses

Home on the range, home, sweet home, home is where the heart is, home is calling, bless our happy home, theres no place like home, my old Kentucky home, you cant go home again, Ill be home for Christmas, and Robert Frost’s claim that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
As a metaphor for being and belonging, HOME is central to exploring American history, politics, literature, culture, architecture, race relations, economics, folklore, and popular culture. By focusing on the American home as a place, a theory, an experience, a fantasy, and a media construct, this course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of America.

The new Gilded Age is a term that scholars, pundits, and activists in recent years have used to refer to the sharp increase in economic inequality in the United States, the increasing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the nations richest 1 percent, and even more so, .1 percent. The roots of this watershed in recent American history are many and run deep. This course will trace some of those roots, examining the origins of Americas new Gilded Age by focusing on major transformations in economics, politics, and education in the 1970s and 1980s. Along the way, we will also consider some of the social experiences and cultural expressions of Americans as they lived through the new Gilded Age.

1948 was the year that Americaafter the Great depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen years of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deallet out its collective breath. Finally, that great exhaling said, we can go back to real life but what was real life? Centering on 1948, but moving a few years back and a few years forward, this class will explore the sometimes instantly celebrated, sometimes all but subterranean experiments in American culture and literature that tried to raise and answer that question. The artists, writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians, poets, and social theorists who emerged to tell that national story included Miles Davis and Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Ross McDonald, J.D. Salinger and Ray Bradbury, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan. This course will follow the traces of this explosion as well as contextualize the American that was being born. It will include films, popular music, Life Magazine, advertising culture and television as well as novels, poetry and discussions of visual images.

World War II lifted the United States from the Great Depression, launching the nation on a course of economic expansion that would endure for a quarter century afterwards. This long economic boom, in turn, helped underwrite and propel efforts on behalf of greater racial and economic equality. By the late 1960s, however, as the long economic boom fizzled out, Americas march toward greater racial equality began to founder, while its march toward greater economic equality began to reverse course. The Civil Rights Era gave way to the New Gilded Age, a period marked by an increasing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a decreasing percentage of the overall population. The course will explore the political, legal, and economic history of Americas struggles for racial equality and economic equity and the relationship between them from the World War II-inspired Double Victory campaign roots of the Civil Rights Era to the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that finally brought national attention to the growing income and wealth polarization that defined the then decades-old New Gilded Age.

This course examines the California wine industry and the people involved in its production, emphasizing those who do the actual labor, from grape pickers and cellar masters to the vineyard managers and winemakers. The course emphasizes the period since the famous wine tasting competition between California and French wines in 1976, which marks the onset of the boom in wine consumption in the U.S. The course takes into account social and cultural trends that impact on the wine industry as well as other key attendant issues: immigrant labor, foreign competition, styles of wine making, and the multiplier effects of the industry, e.g., wine tourism. The course features field trips and guest lectures by farm workers, vineyard managers, wine makers, and winery owners.

This course weaves together two stories that are ordinarily told separately: the history of popular theatrical productions in the United States and the history of American urban life. Both stories focus on New York, and on the meaning of Broadwayas a place, an institution, and a cultural symbol. What does the history of Broadway teach us about popular culture, big city living, racial and ethnic identity, mass spectacle, and everyday life in modern America?
Course requirements include regular attendance, active participation in weekly discussion sections, timely completion of reading assignments and short writing assignments, two midterms, and one cumulative final exam. Books for this class have been ordered through History 100D.

Introduces ways of seeing and interpreting American histories and cultures, as revealed in everyday built surroundingshomes, highways, farms, factories, stores, recreation areas, small towns, city districts and regions. Encourages students to read landscapes as records of past and present social relations, and to speculate for themselves about cultural meaning.

This seminar will focus on three intertwined issues: photography in the American West, the ways in which these photographs were disseminated, and how these images defined and visualized the West for the rest of the country. Defining the West was a lively occupation in the nineteenth century, and photographers and artists were active participants in the ongoing conversation. Western views were not uninflected: they were seen as stereos in the mass market, as part of government surveys and ethnographic reports, in the promotional literature of railroads, agriculture, and mining corporations, and as art objects on the walls of local and national art exhibitions and fairs. We will concentrate primarily on images by Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy OSullivan, Alexander Gardner, William Henry Jackson, Jack Hillers, and Edward Curtis, with attention to their patrons, directives, and the publication history of the images. When possible, we will view original photographs and photographically-illustrated books in the Bancroft Library. By the end of the course, students should have a nuanced understanding of the narrative and discursive powerand limitationsof photographs and their role in shaping and understanding history.
Students who are interested should speak with a faculty advisor.

***NOTE: In order to receive honors in American Studies, a student must have an overall UC GPA of 3.51, and a GPA of 3.65 for all courses taken in completion of the major (upper and lower division). Students should discuss with their major faculty advisor their eligibility to enroll in honors and the preparation of a bibliography and description of their proposed honors thesis.

This course uses film to investigate the central role of race in American culture and history from the late 19th to early 21st century. This class will concentrate on the history of African Americans in film, but we will also watch movies that consider how the overlapping histories of whiteness and ethnicity, American Indians, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, the Third World, multiculturalism and Globalization have been represented through film. Themes covered include representing race and nation; Jim Crow and white supremacy in early Hollywood; genre and racial ideology; borderlands and immigration; passing and miscegenation; the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality; globalization and diaspora. Films include: Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, Salt of the Earth, The Searchers, Imitation of Life, The Godfather, Do the Right Thing, and Children of Men.

UGBA/AS C172 is an undergraduate elective in the history of American business. It covers an amazing history of creative innovation, growth, structural change, challenge, trouble, travailand more growth, more innovation, challenge, and trouble. Less than two hundred years ago, the U.S. was just starting to transform itself from a country of farmers and village craftsmen into a nation based on large scale, mechanized, corporate controlled industry. Today it is an industrial colossus dominated by huge multinational corporations that operate in markets around the world, as well as tiny start-ups hoping to disrupt the whole business system.
At every stage of development, business managers have struggled to deal with an ever-evolving array of problems, challenges, and opportunities. They have had to manage operations, find economic opportunities, and politically maneuver in a marketplace that was being constantly shaped and reshaped by technological innovation and financial change, recessions, depressions, and bubbles, the rise of new markets, and changes in government policy.
Todays richly paid corporate managers are struggling with their own problems, challenges, and opportunities. These include the rise of new media and technological innovation, new forms of marketing, new forms of financial, economic, social and environmental regulation and deregulation, and the rise of dynamic competitors in China, India, Brazil, and other parts of the developing worldas well as the ever-insistent demands from the investor community that they grow their profits every quarter, quarter after quarter, year after year.
The purpose of UGBA/AS C172 is to challenge students think through these issues, past and present. How has American business gotten to where it is today? How can historical insight help us understand the strategic, organizational, geo-political, economic, social, and environmental challenges facing todays global business managers? We will explore the parallels and the differences between current and past developments in business evolution in order to develop deeper understanding of the nature of management problem solving, technological and organizational innovation, and business-government interaction, as well as businesss impact on American culture and society.