Integration in US and Europe

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This class examines the social, spatial and intellectual history of integration in the United States & Europe from the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762) up to the so-called "global revolutions" of 1968. Students will gain a comprehensive introduction to how peasants, (im)migrants, people of color, and other disempowered populations negotiated confraternity and inclusion despite tenacious and arbitrary subjugation and exclusion within and across Western nation-states and colonial possessions between these years. Related topics range from "Indian removal" to persecuted religions; from absolute monarchies to gender discrimination and anti-homosexuality; and from legalized slavery and indentured servitude to histories of genocide. Our seminar, eclectic in scope and method, will put particular emphasis on the transnational implications of related social movements and cultural transformations. Course readings will include: Alexander Pushkin's The Negro of Peter the Great (1837), Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017), Todd Tucker's Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan (2004), and Winston Churchill's "United States of Europe" (1946) speech. No prior background in history is either required or assumed.