Corcoran Department of
History

HIUS 3611 / WGS 3611

History of Gender and Sexuality in America, 1600-1865

Cori Field

This course explores the significance of gender and sexuality in the territory of the present-day U.S. during the period from the first European settlements to the Civil War.  We will ask, on the one hand, how people’s ideas about manhood, womanhood and sexuality structured society and, on the other, how social relations defined what it meant to be a man or a woman.  Readings and discussion will focus on three particular areas of inquiry: the rights and obligations of citizenship; the value and division of labor; and sexual beliefs, practices, and identities.  Resisting any transhistorical definitions, we will investigate how Native, European, and African understandings of gender and sexuality changed over time on the North American continent.  We will pay particular attention to shifting class distinctions and regional differences. 

The goal of this course is to become adept at generating your own historical analysis through the study of primary documents.  The majority of the readings consist of primary sources—letters, diaries, legal documents, prints, and fiction.  In addition, you will read a few secondary sources in order to assess how professional historians analyze and employ evidence.  Through short weekly writing assignments and class discussion, you will use these readings to develop your own analytical skills.  Lectures will introduce topics not covered in the readings.  Two five-page papers and a take-home final exam will require you to synthesize the readings, lectures, and discussion in order to generate your own arguments about the significance of gender in the American past.

There are no prerequisites for this course.   This course does fulfill the second writing requirement.

HIUS 3081 / ASL 3081

History of the American Deaf Community

Christopher Krentz

 This course examines the history of deaf people in the United States over the last three centuries, with particular attention to the emergence and evolution of a community of Deaf people who share a distinct sign language and culture.  We will read both primary texts from specific periods (by writers like Laurent Clerc and Alexander Graham Bell) and secondary sources (such as Douglas Baynton's Forbidden Signs and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries’ Inside Deaf Culture).  We will also view a few historical films.  Among other topics, we will consider how hearing society has treated deaf people and the reasons for this treatment; how deaf people have explained and advocated for themselves; how the deaf community complicates our understanding of linguistic and ethnic minorities and of disabled people in the United States; the impact of technology; and what changing constructions of deafness reveal about the history of American culture in general.  Requirements will include two papers, one midterm exam, one final exam, and active participation. 

HIEU 7001

Colloquium in Medieval European History

Paul Kershaw

This course is intended as an introduction to the historiography of European history in the period c. A.D. 600 to 1300. Each week we will read and discuss an English language monograph or, on occasion, a collection of articles.
Themes of the class include issues of social and cultural change, the interactions of local and central authority, and the relationships between economic, social and political history. This course is intended to introduce students to a range of methodologies and the uses to which a range of original material (inscriptions, historical narratives, formulae, private letters) have been put through a close reading and sustained discussion of a sequence of significant secondary studies. We will read works that draw from anthropology, cognitive psychology and critical theory as well as those deploying what are often perceived to be more traditional approaches to the medieval past. On many occasions the specific work under consideration has prompted formal scholarly reaction, and in these instances we will read these, too. Whilst primarily concerned with recent work we will, on occasion, turn our attention to some 'classic' figures in medieval studies, such as Ernst Kantorowicz or members of the ‘Annales’ school. In the final meetings participants will be asked to select from a series of peer review academic journals and offer class presentations on the types of medieval articles these journals have published over the last 20 years, commenting upon general trends, methodologies, and presenting in-depth analyses of a handful of articles they have found to be particularly illuminating, innovative or engaging. The purpose of these latter classes is to seek to understand not only where medieval history stands in the early 2010s but also where it might go in years to come.

This class is intended not only to orient graduate medievalists within their chosen field but also to offer useful insights to the scholarly approaches pursued in medieval studies to those whose primary research interests lie in either ancient or early modern European history or the study of other areas of the pre-modern past such as literature or art.

HIUS 3131

The Emergence of Modern America, c. 1877- c.1920

Olivier Zunz

The United States changed drastically from a society attached to local forms of life to a society dominated by national institutions, big business, and big government in the period covered in this course. Throughout the course, we will investigate the ways in which Americans have attempted to keep their modern mass society democratic while negotiating the conflicts of region, faith, class, race, and gender.  Among the topics studied in some detail are the rise of corporate America, the simultaneous creation of the regulatory state, the organization of modern knowledge, the creation of the first military-industrial complex of World War I, and the requirements of a consumer culture.  We will focus also on the landscape of large urban and industrial hinterlands in the making of modern America.