Seminar for Majors

Topics

• • Read, analyze, and evaluate primary sources to gain direct knowledge of the thought, actions, and conditions that helped define the American nation and national identity, and which form the basis of critical inquiry, argument, and empirical proof in American studies. • Read, analyze, and evaluate secondary sources that offer scholarly interpretations of key questions in the history of American national consciousness and national culture, thereby developing proficiency in the arguments, methodologies, documentation, and debate that define American studies as a field. • Engage in reasoned, respectful, evidence-based discussion and debate with other interpreters of American culture in verbal and written forms. • Analyze, synthesize, and organize cultural sources to construct accurate, sophisticated, and persuasive verbal and written arguments in answer to historical questions. • Appreciate the variety of historical experience and the multiplicity of subjectivity in order to grasp history's complex and contested meanings for the present.