UGRD > AMST
American Studies Courses
AMST 100 American Identities +
Description:
''What is an American?'' The subject of this course is how the diverse identities of North Americans are constructed, defined, and explained. Through a variety of resources-including historical sources, material artifacts, fiction, poetry, film, and music explore individual, family, community, ethnic, class, gender, and racial identities in relation to regional, national, and transnational identities. More Info
Offered in:AMST 101 Popular Culture in America +
Description:
This course introduces students to the varieties of popular culture in America, including popular literature, live entertainment, radio, movies, and television. In-depth case studies of such particular forms of popular culture as humor and music are included. In class viewing and listening accompany case studies. More Info
Offered in:AMST 110G US Society and Culture since 1945 +
Description:
The course focuses on three broad themes: work, family, and (im)migration, using all three to explore the diversity of American experience with regard to race, class, gender, and ethnicity (culture). This course may count toward the American studies major. More Info
Offered in:AMST 200 Special Topics +
Description:
Various specialized topics are offered once or twice under this heading. Topics change from year to year and are announced before the beginning of each semester. More Info
Offered in:AMST 201L Imagining Latinidad: Historical Trajectories and Everyday Lives +
Description:
This course focuses on the historical and contemporary issues that shape the political, social and cultural practices and experiences of Latinidad in the United States. Topics include: colonialism, imperialism, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, feminisms, migration, diaspora, language, and new/media representations and participation. This is the required gateway course for the Latino Studies minor. More Info
Offered in:AMST 203 The Thirties +
Description:
A study of American society and culture during the years from the Panic of 1929 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941 using several kinds of evidence: the accounts of people who lived during the decade, the interpretations of historians, and the representations of artists, writers, and filmmakers. The objective of the course is to develop an idea of the main characteristics of American society and culture during the 1930s, a conception of the decade's significance, and an increased understanding of the processes of historical and cultural analysis and interpretation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 206 The Sixties +
Description:
The course focuses on protest and the role of youth. Who protested and why? Was the phenomenon of the sixties an aberration or part of a larger radical tradition in America? What was the impact on the seventies? Readings are drawn from the works of participants in the student, black, feminist and peace protest movements, from the intellectuals who defended and attacked them, and from the growing body of retrospective, analytic, and historical literature which attempts to explain what really happened in that tumultuous decade. More Info
Offered in:AMST 209 The 1990s +
Description:
This course studies American culture, society, politics, and social thought in the 1990s. From a stirrings of globalization to the fall of the Communist bloc; from the protests in Seattle to the overthrowing of apartheid in South Africa; from the racial uprisings in Los Angeles to the inertia of Generation X's couch-surfing slackers; the 1990s were a decade marked by accelerating social, cultural, and political change, recorded by an increasingly omnipresent media. This course will study the decade in all its chaotic contradictions and inspiring innovation, particularly focusing on global contexts, generational shifts, emerging identities, and social upheaval. More Info
Offered in:AMST 210 American Society and Culture, 1600-1860 +
Description:
Documents, diaries, letters, essays, fiction, and art, along with secondary historical and anthropological sources, are used to compare the dreams and realities of men's and women's lives in America from the first contact between European explorers and Native Americans up through the Age of Reform (1830-60). Topics include visions of landscape and nature; contrasting cultures of Indians and Anglo-Americans; family and ''women's place''; slavery; working class organization; and women's rights. More Info
Offered in:AMST 211 U.S. Society and Culture, 1860-1940 +
Description:
This course traces the dreams and realities of men's and women's lives in the United States from the Civil War through the Great Depression. Topics include the Westward Movement, the Second Industrial Revolution, immigrants and the city, World War I, the great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, and the emergence of a consumer society in the 1920's. Among the materials analyzed in this course are primary sources such as photographs and paintings, film, short stories and poetry, letters and diaries, and public documents, as well as secondary-source analyses of specific themes and issues presented in scholarly historical essays. More Info
Offered in:AMST 212G The US in the Eighties +
Description:
This course examines the politics and experiences of President Reagan's ''morning in America,'' including family life, work, and organized labor; changes in the pattern of wealth and poverty; the enlargement of the role of the media in culture and politics; and US interventions in Central America and elsewhere. Capabilities addressed: Critical reading, critical thinking, clear writing, academic self assessment, collaborative learning, information technology. More Info
Offered in:AMST 215L America on Film +
Description:
This course focuses on the flowering of American cinema through decades of social, political, and cultural change. It examines both classic representations of ''The American Experience'' and films which challenge such classic representations. The relations between film and other arts, and between film, history, and ideology, are an ongoing concern. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 217 American Superheroes +
Description:
The superhero has been a part of American culture since 1938 but has grown more prominent in recent years as the figure has proliferated across media forms including film, television, comics, and even literary fiction. What does the surging popularity of superhero narratives tell us about American society in the 21st century? What can the evolution of the genre tell us about the ways in which American ideas about power, politics, morality, and heroism have changed over the past eighty-five years? This course offers an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of diverse representations of superheroes in historical context. Through lecture, class discussion, papers, and presentations, students will gain a greater understanding of how the superhero story reflects and perhaps even shapes American culture. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 223L Asians in the United States +
Description:
This multidisciplinary course examines the social, historical, and structural contexts defining the Asian American experience from 1850 to the present. Topics include immigration, labor, community settlement, ethnicity, stereotypes, and race relations. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 225L Southeast Asians in the United States +
Description:
This course examines issues arising from the resettlement of one million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees in the US since 1975. Topics include resettlement policies, adjustment and acculturation, changing roles of women and family, and the continuing impact of international politics. Media presentations and lectures by local Southeast Asian community leaders highlight the course. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 228L Asian Women in the United States +
Description:
Drawing on women's voices in literature, sociocultural research, and historical analysis, this course examines the experience of Asian women in the United States from 1850 to the present. Topics include the transformation of Asian women's traditional roles as part of the acculturation process; exclusion; changing roles within the Asian American family; resistance to oppression as defined by race, gender, class; and the continuing impact of international politics. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 235 The Social History of Popular Music +
Description:
This course analyzes the social forces, technological advances, and multicultural influences that have contributed to the development of US popular music, including Tin Pan Alley pop, blues, country, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, rock, soul, punk, disco, rap, and heavy metal. Popular music is treated as commercial mass culture and discussed as a social indicator. Extensive use is made of audio and video recordings. More Info
Offered in:AMST 240G War in American Culture +
Description:
The course examines American cultural productions (essays, novels, poems, films) centered on the nation's wars, focusing on the ''American Way of War''; images of the soldier/veteran; and images of the enemy. Material is analyzed through the perspective of the Idealist, the Jingoist and the Dissenting-perspectives found in cultural artifacts dealing with America's wars. Capabilities addressed: Critical reading, critical thinking, clear writing. More Info
Offered in:AMST 250 U.S. Travel and Tourism +
Description:
Tourism is the world's largest industry. We encounter tourists on Boston's Freedom Trail, Harvard Square in Cambridge and on Cape Cod. In turn, we ourselves are tourists as we travel to Washington D.C., Disneyworld, and beyond. The tourist experience shapes our understanding of the past, our perceptions of ourselves and others, and our notions of the 'authentic' and the 'exotic.' Tourist encounters often place inequalities based upon class, race and ethnicity in sharp relief. Using history, anthropology, and cultural studies, this course explores the nature of tourism and how it affects and reflects U.S. culture. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 257L Queer Literature and History in the 20th Century US +
Description:
This course introduces historical approaches to studying queer literature of the 20th century United States. The course highlights the historical work of queer literature through in-depth textual analysis and by studying related historical archives. Units include the Harlem Renaissance, gay literature of the 1960s and 70s, and lesbian pulp. Each unit in the course selects specific archives to pair with literary texts. In addition, students will do independent work on a literary text and archive of their choosing. Through both the required readings and the independent projects, students will engage directly and systematically with the study of creative production and human expression. This is a hands-on interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 260L African-American Folklore +
Description:
This course examines the development and the significance of African-American folklore through study of its various genres: music, tales, legends, shorter verbal forms, material culture, folk belief, and folk humor. Emphasis is given to both African survivals and Indo-European influences in these genres.AFRSTY 260L and AMST 260L are the same course. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 263 The History of Hip Hop and Hip Hop as History +
Description:
This course examines how significant American cultural form is a vessel for understanding history and social issues. We will explore hip hop from numerous angles: its historical development, various ways of interpreting it textually, the social conversations it has hosted and the many cultural categories it has penetrated, including film and television, literature, fashion, and journalism. There will be several visitors to the class who are engaged in the Boston hip hop scene, and students will work with the hip hop archive that the Healey library has acquired as well as interacting with hip hop's Boston manifestations. This is a hands-on, interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation. More Info
Offered in:AMST 268L The Italian-American Experience +
Description:
This course examines the cultural history of Italian-American communities from the early Twentieth century to present. The course will explore representations of Italian-Americans in literature, film and popular culture. Taught in English, no previous knowledge of Italian is required. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 270L Native Peoples of North America +
Description:
An introductory survey of Native American societies and cultures. Emphasis is given to the descriptive comparison of selected Native American societies, on their histories, and on problems in cross-cultural understanding. The course focuses on pre-twentieth century cultures and history. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 278L U.S. Documentary Photography +
Description:
This course examines U.S. documentary photographs as constructions of the past that articulate the social and political assumptions of their times. We will assess the impact of these photographs on their contemporary audiences and how they have shaped Americans' collective memories of such events as the conquest of the West, mass immigration, the Great Depression, and 9/11. More Info
Offered in:AMST 285L Food in American Culture +
Description:
This course examines the cultural history and meanings of ''American'' foodways at home and abroad from the colonial period to the present. It considers how nation, region, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, global politics, and corporate America affect food production and consumption. It explores how the histories of immigration, industrialization, suburbanization, and globalization have transformed what, how, where, and why Americans eat, as well as how American food is perceived throughout the world.AMST 285L and HIST 285L are the same course. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 301L Childhood in America +
Description:
An interdisciplinary treatment of conceptions and practices of child nature and nurture in the United States, viewed in the context of American culture and history. The course begins with an historical overview of child life in America, with special attention to Puritan New England, nineteenth century industrialization and urbanization, and twentieth century trends. In treating contemporary childhood, the course examines mainstream patterns of the middle and working classes, both rural and urban; African-American child and family life; Hispano-American child and family life; enculturation among selected American Indian groups; the importance of gender as a variable in childhood experience; and the growing importance of formal institutions-such as schools, youth organizations, and medical institutions-as environments for young people. Children's own cultural constructions, in the form of games and folklore, are also considered. The course concludes with an examination of selected policy issues affecting children, such as child abuse, medical intervention, day care, and the Children's Rights Movement. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 310 Television in American Life +
Description:
The American experience with television and its cultural, political, and economic implications. Topics include technological innovation, entrepreneurship, the changing cultural content of ''prime-time'' programming, and public broadcasting cable system capabilities. More Info
Offered in:AMST 311L American Oral History +
Description:
This course explores oral history interviewing, texts, and films, within the context of efforts to create a fully representative social and cultural history of the US. Students design individual or group oral history projects, to capture the experiences and perspectives of people formerly regarded as ''unhistorical''-in particular, women, working class people, immigrants, people of color, and gays and lesbians. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 315L Asian American Cinema +
Description:
This course examines the independently-produced films and videos by Asian American filmmakers and artists. Asian American independent cinema first emerged as early as the 1910s, but developed most significantly in the civil rights era and closely connected to both the Asian American political movement and the development of the Third World Independent filmmaking. This class begins with an exploration of the early history of Asian and Asian American son the American screen and then shifts to consider the role of Asian Americans behind the camera. We explore the post- 1960s production of Asian American film and video, ranging from documentary and narrative features to experimental, avant-garde, and short video. This is a hands-on, interactive course designed with the support of the Mellon Foundation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 325L Sexual Identities in American Culture +
Description:
This course studies the history of sexual identities in the twentieth-century United States, with a particular emphasis upon the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities, through the study of cultural texts such as novels, songs, films, and poems. Topics covered in the course include homosexuality in the turn-of-the-century United States, sex in the Harlem Renaissance, sexual politics in the Depression years, purges of gay women and men in federal employment during the cold war and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. More Info
Offered in:AMST 335 Music And Politics +
Description:
This course treats popular music as a social indicator, examining the relationship between popular music and various social issues, problems, and movements. It is organized thematically, addressing such topics as racism, sexism, censorship, social change, consciousness raising, and the impact of globalization. The course draws on historical and contemporary readings at the intermediate and advanced levels. There is extensive use of audio and video recordings to explicate various themes and issues. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 343L The Cultural Politics of HIV/AIDS +
Description:
This course uses feminist, queer, and critical race frameworks to interrogate the social, political, and cultural aspects of HIV/AIDS. Not merely a virus, HIV is also a set of cultural meanings tied to gender, race, nation, and the body. By focusing on political activism and cultural production (film, art, etc.) we will employ a critical humanistic approach to the epidemic that goes beyond biomedicine or epidemiology. Because a great deal of the popular and scholarly attention to the AIDS crisis has focused on white, gay, cisgender men, the course examines the politics of HIV/AIDS through an intersectional lens that takes into account how race, gender, class, nationality and so on have shaped the crisis and the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. Although we will focus on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in the United States from the time the crisis emerged in the early 1980s through today, we will also consider the pandemic in terms of US empire. More Info
Offered in:AMST 344 From Bus Boycott to Black Lives Matter: The Black Freedom Struggle in the U.S. and Beyond +
Description:
This course traces the struggle for racial justice in the United States from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 to the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the Ferguson Uprising in 2014. The course challenges popular conceptions of both movements and enables students to interpret the causes, impacts, limitations, and legacies of both through analyses of primary sources, histories of the periods, and contemporary assessments. With an emphasis on the grassroots, black feminist, intersectional, and coalitional politics of the black freedom struggle, the course integrates interdisciplinary methods to critically engage with racial justice activism. Although focused on U.S.-based movements, the course is attuned to how these movements have shaped and been shaped by global black freedom struggles, producing a transnational and cross-cultural phenomenon. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 349L The Cold War: Rise and Fall +
Description:
This course examines the shifting US and Russian images of each other during the rise and fall of the Cold War. It focuses in particular on the way that issues of difference play out in the US/Soviet/Russian encounter, and on the emergence of public perceptions which linked struggles for racial, gender, and social equality with Communism and its agents. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 350L Race, Class, and Gender: Issues in US Diversity +
Description:
This course deals with the interrelationship of race, class and gender, exploring how they have shaped the experiences of all people in the United States. Focusing on race, class and gender as distinct but interlocking relationships within society, the course examines both the commonalities and the differences that different historical experiences have generated. More Info
Offered in:AMST 352L Harlem Renaissance +
Description:
This course focuses on major texts of the Harlem Renaissance within contexts of modernism, history, and the development of an African American literary tradition. The course will examine how literature creates and represents real and ''imagined'' communities and will explore the diverse and often contradictory roles that literature plays in shaping, resisting, and reinforcing cultural discourses. More Info
Offered in:AMST 353L Borderlands, Diasporas, and Transnational Identities +
Description:
This course focuses on the issues relating to migration, imperialism, state formation, human rights, and the performance of citizenship and national belonging among Latina/o/xs. The courses bring together historical essays, news media, music, poetry, and other forms of expressive culture in an exploration of the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that produce geopolitical borders; the formation of diasporic and transnational identities in relation to ancestral homelands; the contradictions posed by using geography to define Latina/o/xs; and the racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies within Latinidad. The course pays particular attention to these questions in relation to the border between the US and Mexico; the Dominican Republic and Haiti; Mexico and Central America; and Puerto Rico and the United States. More Info
Offered in:AMST 355L Black Popular Culture +
Description:
This course requires students to engage with Black/African diasporic cultural products intended for a mass audience. The macro-contents of American and global consumer capitalism and the micro- categories of ethnicity, gender, and sexualities are used as a framework for the critical analysis of production, consumption, and reception of African American popular culture in the US and abroad. More Info
Offered in:AMST 360 Work, Society, and Culture in Modern America +
Description:
This course has a double focus: the history of work in the modern US, and the cultural representations (fiction, movies, television, music, and others) that people have made of their working lives. All manner of work-from domestic service to farm labor-is considered. Above all, this course examines how work functions as a ''way of life'' in American cultural history. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 372L American Women Writers and American Culture +
Description:
This course examines the significant contribution that women writers have made to the creation and development of an American national literature and culture. Points of emphasis include studying representative writers from different historical periods; examining the structures, forms, themes, concerns, and cultural contexts of individual works; and examining the relation of women's writing to American culture. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 375 Best Sellers in American Society +
Description:
''Best sellers'' have shaped American views of science and nature; molded American business behavior; affected Americans' notions of the past and their expectations of the future; and shaped public perceptions of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. In this course, we will read popular works, both fiction and nonfiction, published over the past century and a half and discuss the ways in which these books have influenced our images of our society and ourselves. The best sellers we will examine are those which were extremely popular with large sections of the public and/or influential in changing public opinion on major social issues. Readings for the course include Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone with the Wind, The Power of Positive Thinking, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, and the novels of Stephen King. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 376L Women of Color +
Description:
This course offers interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives on a variety of theories, themes, and issues related to the experiences of women of color in both U.S. and global contexts. It examines the genealogies, practices, and agendas of women of color ''feminisms,'' and promotes a dialogue about the interactive impact of race, class, and gender on women's lives.AMST 376L and WGS 376L are the same course. More Info
Offered in:AMST 380 Kennedys Of Boston +
Description:
This course provides a background on the Kennedys and their times. It analyzes some of the political and cultural processes of which the Kennedys were a part, and in particular traces the rise of the Kennedy family in the context of the Boston Irish. Audio-visual material is used where appropriate to examine the role played by the media, that is, print, film, and television, then and now, in forming popular images of the Kennedy family. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 383L Masculinities +
Description:
This course explores how boys and men construct and perform gender in the U.S. This course investigates the production of masculinities in various institutional contexts such as family, school, work, and sports. This course examines the diverse experiences of boys and men by unpacking the intersections of masculinities with other systems of power such as race, class, and sexual orientation. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 394L Radical Voices of Resistance: Gender, Race and US Social Movements +
Description:
This class explores activist engagements in several interrelated social movements in the U.S. throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Through reading and discussion of primary documents, biography, and historical research, we analyze the motivations and strategies of women activists in tension with gendered and racialized expectations and practices in historical context. More Info
Offered in:AMST 402L History of US Visual Media +
Description:
This course examines the historical, cultural, and aesthetic importance of visual images in shaping ideas about empire, race, gender, sexuality, class, work, and nation in American history, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first. We will explore how different historical contexts change how and why we look as consumers. We will learn how to interpret and analyze different forms of visual media, including motion pictures, political cartoons, live performance, photographs, and print advertising. More Info
Offered in:AMST 405 The Immigrant Experience +
Description:
Through letters, essays, autobiography, fiction, film, oral and written history, the course explores the historical and cultural issues raised by native-born Americans (Anglos) and immigrants (Aliens) who were involved during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in defining the sometimes agonizing process of becoming an American. Representative documents reveal a variety of conflicting views about the process and meaning of Americanization: from the defensive essays of Anglo-Saxon supremacists, through Jane Addams' sensitive witness of immigrant life, the letters, diaries and accounts of immigrants, and two works of immigrant fiction. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 410 Cultural History of U.S. Media +
Description:
This capstone course will explore the historical emergence of selected media: the Penney Press in the 1830s, film 1896-1932, radio 1928-1960, and television 1948-1977. Examining these media in the period of emergence will show how each relied on and challenged prior forms of conveying information and telling stories, reshaping boundaries between fictional and the real. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 411L Post 9/11 Culture: Rumors, Stories and Songs +
Description:
This American Studies course is interested in exploring the cultural legacies of 9/11. This 9/11 class will not be explicitly concerned itself with capital 'P' politics: the real burden of the course has more to do with the construction of a rhetoric of what I call '9/11 culture' in American popular arts than with the motivations, strategies, or outcomes associated with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003. Yet the wars shadow every moment of the class. I will begin the class by showing America: A Tribute to Heroes, the celebrity telethon that was broadcast on September 21, mostly to help students begin to understand the rapid deployment of hero as a keyword in our post-9/11 discourse. Throughout the course we will consider keywords and phrases that came to define the era. First responder, hero, terrorist, and so on, will all come under historically-contextualized scrutiny. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 430 Music & Amer Lit +
Description:
What special insight into American literature can be gained by linking literary texts to musical ones? This course examines the various ways in which popular musical forms, tropes, performance styles, mythologies (and so forth) have shaped, and been shaped by, twentieth-century American literature. Musical genres considered include blues, hip hop, punk, Tex-Mex, soul, and country. Weekly responsibilities include intensive and systematic listening as well as reading assignments. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 440L United States in a Global Context +
Description:
This course will situate the United States in a global context by considering US and non-US perspectives on key events of the twentieth century. Special focus: Public, media/arts as well as government perspectives. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 470L New England Literature and Culture +
Description:
A study of the New England literary tradition from about 1850 to the near present. How have writers and critics contested their differing versions of native grounds and reinvented the New England idea in their works? Consideration of such topics as Native American culture, Puritanism and Transcendentalism, slavery and Abolitionism, immigration and ethnicity, nationalism and regionalism, industrialization, and popular culture. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 471L The City in American Literature and Culture +
Description:
A study of physical, social, and cultural aspects of the American city, as reflected and constructed in architecture, the arts (literature, film, music, visual arts), and theory. The course focuses on four historical periods: the mid-19th century, the turn of thecentury, the mid-20th century, and the present; and includes a capstone research project. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 476L Current Issues in Native America +
Description:
This seminar focuses on the lives of modern Native Americans, on reservations and off. Topics for reading, discussion, and original research include law, politics, economic development, public health, education, and the arts. Each student in the seminar compiles and presents a comprehensive case study on a subject relevant to one of the seminar themes. More Info
Offered in:- TBA
AMST 478 Independent Study +
AMST 479 Independent Study +
Description:
Advanced students may conduct independent research under the supervision and guidance of members of the faculty. More Info
Offered in:AMST 490 Internship in American Studies +
Description:
Part-time experience in an appropriate business, government, public advocacy, or non-profit institution, supervised by an on-site supervisor and an American Studies Program faculty advisor. Bi-weekly conferences with faculty advisor and written/audio-visual work are required. More Info
Offered in:AMST 498 Honors +
Description:
The student defines and writes the Honors project with the help of an American studies faculty advisor and enrolls in AMST 498-499. For full details, see Student Handbook. More Info
Offered in:AMST 499 Honors II +
Description:
The student defines and writes the Honors project with the help of an American studies faculty advisor and enrolls in AMST 498/499. More Info
Offered in: