Historicizing american

Readings in Twentieth-Century US History

The first semester of this year-long seminar will seek to introduce students to some of the major historiographical debates
within a range of subfields of the literature of twentieth-century US history. Our readings will be drawn from high impact
works of historical scholarship; class discussions each week will take shape around a consideration of the historiographical,
theoretical, methodological, and political stakes of these works. We will use our readings as entry points into some of the
major currents shaping the world of research in the humanities and social sciences today: critical race studies, gender
studies, feminism, queer studies, environmental studies, cultural studies, transnationality, intersectionality, among others.
One of our main objectives will be to historicize the present—that is to say, to excavate the structures and subterranean
histories that help to determine the political possibilities of our time. Another will be to investigate the methodologies and
theoretical tools available to historians working on twentieth-century US history. Students in the seminar will be expected
to contribute their thoughts each week to an online forum and to participate actively in class.

Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Harvard University Press, 1999).
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press,
2009).
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2005).
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History, Volume 78, Issue 4,
(March 1992): 1347-1376.
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New Press, 2012).
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965
(University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books, 2020).
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (University of
Minnesota Press, 2011).
Alice O’Conner, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History
(Princeton University Press, 2001).
Robin Kelley, “'We Are Not What We Seem': Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in Jim Crow South,” Journal of
American History 80, no. 1 (June 1993): 75-112.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Norton, 2009).
Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Harvard University Press, 2011).
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford
University Press, 1993).