Week 1: January 22: Introduction
Week 2 January 29: World’s Collide: Race, Place and Conquest
Readings: Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise, Selections; Don Mitchell, “A Place for Everyone: Cultural Geographies of Race” in Cultural Geography: An Introduction, 230-258; The Letter of Columbus to Luis de Sant Angel Announcing His Discovery (1493) http://www.bartleby.com/43/2.html; Amerigo Vespucci’s Account of His First Voyage (1497) http://www.bartleby.com/43/3.html
Discussion Assignment # 1: Write a one-page discussion of the readings that draws on the work of Kirkpatrick Sale and Don Mitchell to analyze Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci’s presentation of America’s indigenous people. Your discussion should consider what role, if any, that race, space and place play in shaping in the two explorers’ responses the native peoples they meet, and what other factors might have influenced their descriptions of these groups
Week 3, February 5: Race, Place and Space in the Settlement of Virginia
Readings: Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (Hill and Wang, 2005); Mary Rowlandson, The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/rownarr.html
Discussion Assignment #2: Come to class prepared to compare and contrast the experiences of Pocahontas and Mary Rowlandson. What can the experiences of each woman tell us about their societies of origin and the
Week 4, February 12: Land, Labor and Slavery
T.H Breen, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (Oxford University Press, 1982); Patrick Wolf, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race, American Historical Review 106:3 (June 2001) http://search.epnet.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=4841622 (access via JSTOR)
Film Race: The History of an Illusion, 2.
1st paper due
1st Paper Assignment: Write a five page paper analyzing the early Spanish and American settlements discussed in our readings in terms of thesis that Patrick Wolf lays out in his article on “Land, Labor and Difference.” To what extent do the elementary structures of race he describes in his article capture the social and political relationships described in our reading?
Week 5, February 19: Race and Region
Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers, Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California(University of New Mexico Press, 1999)
John Kuo Wei Tchen New York before Chinatown : Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882; selections
Ken Burn’s, The West: Volume 1, The People (to 1806)
Week 6, February 26: The Geography of Slavery and Freedom
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Every Day Resistance in the Plantation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Patrick Minges, Beneath the Underdog, Race, Religion and the Trail of Tears, The American Indian Quarterly 25:3 (2001), 453-479
Paper and Presentation Topic Option # 1: Indian Removal
Week 7, March 5: Race, Place and Labor in Emancipation in Era
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor, (Harvard University Press, 2002)
Paper and Presentation Topic Option #2: Chinese Exclusion, Asian Immigrants in the US.
Week 8, March 12: Race, Place and Immigration
David Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Become White. The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (Basic Books, 2005)
Paper and Presentation Topic Option #2: This History of Whiteness
March 19, break – No Classes
Week 9: March 27: The Solid South
Jennifer Rittenhouse, Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Film: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Discussion Assignment # 3: Please hand in one-page response paper chronicling your thoughts on Rittenhouse’s book.
Week 10, April 2: Race, Sex and Urbanization
Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press)
Paper and Presentation Topic Option #4: The history of interracial relationships
Week 11, April 9: Race and War:
Julie Otsaka, When the Emperor Was Divine (Penguin Books, 2002)
Film: Snow Falling on the Cedars
Paper and Presentation Option #4: Japanese Internment
Week 12, April 16: Race and Residence
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994
Film: Race History of an Illusion 3
Week 13, April 23: Defining the Boundaries of America
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Paper and Presentation Topic # 5: 20th Century Immigration or Immigration Policy
Week 14, April 30: Race, Space and Place in Modern American Cities
Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: U.S. Latinos Reinvent the Big City (Verso 2001); Mike Davis, "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," in The Ecology of Fear; Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster; Robin D.G. Kelley, “Playing for Keeps”
Discussion Assignment 5: Drawing on the readings, discuss the racial geography of contemporary American cities.