Courses

The so-called cultural turn in historiography during the 1980s dramatically reordered the historical profession’s scholarly landscape.  This seminar provides students with an understanding of the major currents and themes in the cultural history of modern America while also introducing them to the scholarly methods and approaches used in historical scholarship working with the concept of culture. To that end, the seminar proceeds in two ways. We will begin by sampling works that exemplify key approaches to writing cultural history that offer a meta-history of the culture concept as it has informed historical scholarship.   The second part of the seminar offers a partial survey of modern U.S. culture itself: its shifting ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality; its organization of subcultures, pleasure, and danger; its culture industries and their audiences and means of creating and disseminating information; and its reining nationalist narratives and symbols.