487D  PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815     (Oberdeck)

            Topic:  U.S. Cultural and Intellectual History

            This course is designed to introduce students to conceptual problems that have shaped the historiography of American cultural and intellectual life; key monographic and article-length secondary sources addressing these issues as they inform our understanding of U.S. history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and important primary documents in the intellectual history of American understandings of “culture.”  This tall order will be addressed in two units.  The first unit addresses definitional, theoretical and methodological issues in American cultural and intellectual history, including problems of how to define and study popular culture, how to locate and interpret the role of intellectuals in U.S. history; how changing constructions of “the public” shape and connect these definitions.  The readings in the second unit survey in loosely chronological fashion key arenas where historians have investigated questions empirically, applying in the process a range of important methodological approaches to the problem of studying culture.  This unit will also feature some readings on the history of “culture” itself as a changing concept in American intellectual life.  Key topics will likely include evolutionary thought and constructions of race and ethnicity consumption; cultural constructions of class identity; changing forms of commercial entertainment; gender; constructions of space and place.